It’s always great to get a second chance to photograph a place. The first visit is about discovery and it’s sometimes overwhelming as you try and take everything in. The return visit is often more about details or things you just didn’t see the first time. Different light conditions and weather can also dramatically change how a place looks and feels.

My second day in Granada, Spain, began with a return visit to the Alhambra. This time the first stop was the Palace of Charles V — a building I had bypassed entirely on my first visit. The main space is circular and ringed by a colonnade. Around the periphery are smaller rooms like this one with the staircase (This is actually three photos stitched together in Photoshop):

It was hard to get the main courtyard all in-frame and to show it full circle. I went to my rarely used fisheye for this shot and actually like the distortion it creates. I had used this lens in a circular Art Deco church in Tulsa in April, and realized that the distortion is less confusing in round spaces. One of those little tidbits I’ll file away for future shoots. You never know when you’ll find yourself in a round room, right?

After the Palace of Charles V we followed much the same path on this visit as I had taken on Day 1. Here are just a few more shots of things I saw differently this second time around:

This next photo really shows the advantage of visiting at different times of day. I had photographed this room the afternoon before but the light was not coming through the stained glass as it did this following morning. The patches of colored light on the wall add an altogether different feel to the image and tells more of the story of what’s going on outside of the frame.

More Granada to come…