A WESTERN IN VALENCIAAdriana & Ondrej
Here is the honest part first: Adriana and Ondrej are engaged, this was not their wedding, and I am quietly campaigning to shoot the real one.
I have photographed these two in Spain twice now, and neither time did anyone get married. The first was inside the Muralla Roja in Calpe, Ricardo Bofill’s maze of blood-red walls and blue staircases that looks more like a film set than a place people actually live in. This one came with a looser brief and a longer map: a portrait day, styled like a Western, running from the sand at Calpe up into the dry hills of the Valencia interior. No vows, no cake, no timeline to keep. Just two people who obviously like each other and a lot of good country to point them at.
Somewhere in the middle of it, Fujifilm handed me a camera and a reason. They were launching the X-T50 and wanted a film built around a real session, and this was the one. I have shot with their cameras as an X-Photographer since 2016, long enough that I stop noticing the gear and just watch the two people in front of it. The film is at the bottom of this post.
One thing worth saying early. Every frame here came straight out of the camera as a JPEG, colour and black and white alike, chosen from the day and finished the same day it was shot. No raw files, nothing reworked later. It is something I now offer couples outright: if you want your photographs the day of the wedding or the session, you can have them, and this set and the Muralla Roja one before it both came together exactly that way.
Calpe
It began on the beach at Calpe, the Muralla Roja a few streets back and the Peñón de Ifach out at sea behind them, the rock you have seen on a hundred postcards whether you meant to or not.
Calpe early on is wide and open and mostly empty, which is about all a beach needs to be for this kind of work. Adriana and Ondrej took the waterline while I stayed back with a long lens and out of their way. Then the coast was done, and the road turned inland, which in the Valencia interior means up, and then up again.
Chelva
Chelva is a couple of hours inland, an old town of white houses stacked up a hillside, its lanes painted for reasons I never did get to the bottom of in bright coloured dots underfoot.
This is a town you photograph slowly. Narrow streets, potted plants, a wrong turn every thirty seconds, and the two of them wandering through it like someone had handed them the keys. The church I set to black and white in the camera, which is still how I see a day first. Not a look I put on for Spain. Just the order my eye works in.
Peña Cortada
The last stop was Peña Cortada, a Roman aqueduct thrown across a gorge two thousand years ago and mostly still where the Romans left it.
You can still walk the channel the water once ran through, a stone gutter about a boot wide, pinned to the wall of the gorge with a long drop and not much between you and it. It is a place where people go quiet, and then go careful. I worked most of it into the sun, chasing the flare and letting Adriana and Ondrej fall into silhouette along the ridgeline, two small shapes against a great deal of old rock. This was the stretch of the day I could have kept shooting into the following week.
So: two days in Spain with these two, and not one wedding to show for it. I am holding out for the third. If you found your way here looking for a wedding photographer somewhere around Valencia, and what you got instead was two people in cowboy hats who are not married yet, not for lack of my hinting, stay anyway. Whenever you make yours real, I would love to be the one standing in the gorge with you. Or on the beach. Or wherever in this part of Spain you decide to do it.
The film
The film Fujifilm made for the X-T50 launch is just below. It is the work of Marq Riley, a filmmaker I have been lucky to keep working with for years, one of the real ones, and one of the few people whose eye I trust like my own.
