Place names are seductive. By themselves they can draw me to a distant place on the map. But often there is disappointment—the place doesn’t live up to its name. That was not the case in the Galapagos. In its other worldliness it exceeded expectations. This mainly had to do with wildlife and our continuous proximity to it. For a time this was a problem photographically. If an iguana or an owl has never sat beside you and then it does you will think ‘this is a picture’ and act accordingly. But that picture is not a photograph. All of the things that elevate an image—refined composition, worthy light, telling moments— still mattered in images of the near-at-hand wildlife, perhaps even more so.
It is always so with exotic subjects.
So it took time to go beyond the seductive surface of the Galapagos and make images worthy of the place and its evocative name.