I thought I’d follow up on my last post with a few shots from my room at the Parador de Guadalupe. As I mentioned before, we stayed in Paradores most of our nights in Spain and they never disappointed. Each is unique architecturally, food/service was excellent, and you just couldn’t beat their locations. However, of all of them I encountered, I think I was most taken with the balcony view from my room in Guadalupe. I had very little time to spend in the room, but both sunset and sunrise found me out on the balcony, photographing that view. Sometimes you have to really work hard to find the right location — the perfect angle — and sometimes it’s just handed to you.

Here is a view of my room and a stitched panorama of the overall view from my balcony:

These were taken just after checking in and before taking a tour of the monastery, seen in the right of the panoramic image. By the time I got back to the room, the clouds were more defined and the sun was beginning to set, so out I went on my balcony:

I settled on this view (above) with my full-frame Nikon D700 and locked it down on the tripod to get a series of shots as the light changed. I was hoping that, at some point, some exterior lighting might come on to contrast with the cobalt blue skies that I expected just after sunset. The sun was actually going down to the left of this scene so, while my one camera body was occupied with the monastery, I shot variations of the sunset itself with my D7000:

The D7000 shots were hand-held so I had to increase my ISO to achieve a faster shutter speed. I knew that would result in more noise, but I was less concerned about that in these shots than in my primary images that I was shooting with the D700.

The coloration was less interesting at first, but the clouds were fairly dramatic. Converting some of these early shots to black and white (using Lightroom 5 and/or Photoshop CC) was a nice solution. The next series of images shows the gradual darkening of the sky and the subtle warm colors that began to emerge from the street lights that were bouncing back to illuminate the towers.

While there never were any floodlights or other exterior illumination on the monastery, the bounced street lights were enough to add quite a bit of warmth as the evening got darker. The shot above was taken well after dark and the intensity of the colors shown here was not visible to the eye. Only the long exposure was able to draw it out, softening the sky at the same time by the blur of the moving clouds. I was using 30-second exposures at this point.

The next morning I resumed my position for sunrise and caught a few pre-dawn images with a beautifully clear sky:

One last shot of the monastery just before sunrise with the main courtyard of the Parador seen in the foreground. Once the sun broke over the mountains, the light was actually a little too harsh for my taste and several of the towers were casting harsh shadows on one another. It was time to pack up the gear anyway before grabbing a quick breakfast and heading off to our next stop: Merida, Spain.

You can learn more about the Parador de Guadalupe on their website, which I notice has been redesigned just in the last couple of weeks. Lots of good info there if you’re planning a visit in Spain.