The Wind Comb
El Peine del Viento
Without the mundane, we can not know what is beautiful.
But when everything is beautiful, we struggle to decide what we will photograph.
Just south of the French border in the western Pyrenees lies the seaside town of San Sebastian. This coastal city in the Spanish Basque province of Gipuzkoa arcs around the shores of La Concha Bay. Through the straits of the bay lies the Atlantic Ocean.
Photography opportunities were numerous, but it was at the western end of the boardwalk along the bay where I encountered the most elegant scene of my visit. A rugged sandstone ridge, which separates the bay from the ocean, plunges below the waves of the Atlantic at this location.
Land transitions to open ocean, and attached to weathered yellow, brown, and gray rocks jutting from the sea, I found nine tons of steel.
Created by artist Eduardo Chillida, three steel sculptures grace the ocean’s edge forming El Peine del Viento (‘The Wind Comb’).
My immediate question was, “How do I capture this?”
Form, tone, and color were the available raw materials, and the scene in front of me was filled with all three. My first instinct was to use form and tone to show the three components of the Wind Comb in the photo above.
Next, I zoomed in on the most distant sculpture and used a soft color filter to emphasize the contrast between rock, rusting steel, and sky. I was taken with the intertwining of blue, red, and muted yellow.
But when I zoomed out from the distant sculpture, I switched to a sepia filter and dialed up the texture and clarity. The complexity of the foreground rock was my main target in this permutation.
I returned to color but kept the texture and clarity filters on. The image above focuses on the left, mountain-side comb leaving the most distant sculpture in the background. It’s only when using the color filter that we can enjoy the red of rusting steel dripping onto the granite below.
These two monochrome renderings align the near and distant sculptures focusing on form and directing the viewer’s eye over the distant ocean horizon.
The last of my photos captures the righthand bayside sculpture suspended over the horizon, combing the wind.
(All photos were taken by the author with an iPhone 15 pro using both optical and digital zoom. The digital post-processing used Adobe PS Express — All images copyrighted by Archean Enterprises, LLC, 2024)
