I've been to Spain four times now, and every time we visited, we spent most of the time with family albeit a few day trips here and there. I really haven't travelled around Europe very much, and Spain is my real foray into the region. I love it that this region has so much variety in cultures all packed into one of the smaller continents. I've seen enough road trip movies as a kid to have that idealic impression of a road trip, made famous by the likes of Easy Rider, Smokey and the Bandit, and The Motorcycle Diaries. Even though I have been on many mini road trips around the US, I've never been on a planned one. It was about time I experienced one. So the summer of 2011 we decided to start with Spain - a road trip from the northern tip of Spain in Santander, all the way to the southern coast, to Fuengorila/Malaga, and really see the country from road warriors point of view. I tried to enjoy the places more than take pictures, so there are tons of pictures of places that are missing from this trip, but in essence, we visited 12 towns, in about 7 days. I named this series SN2S 12/7 (Spain, North to South, 12 Towns in 7 Days) to mimic the European car license plates - a fitting name, I thought, if any.

We first start with Santander, which is the regular pit stop every time we visit Spain. We always have a great time when we visit here, and this time was no exception. We start with a picture of Sergio, wearing the Spanish national colors. This is quite fitting to start a picture of a road trip in Spain, I thought, and the bright national colors stands in quite stark contrast on top of the concrete background.

A Drive through Switzerland

A drive through Switzerland is everything that I thought it would be. Mountains, lakes and the requisite chocolate stops makes this one of the more memorable road trips in Europe.

Cliché

Aside from the pristine beaches, there is another side of Jamaica landscape that I noticed when I ventured out from the sheltered resort area. When you venture inland, there is a plethora of other scenery that is very different than the tourism posters of Jamaica. I happened to walk off the hotel property, and stumbled upon the edge of golf course which was not really part of it, but still was very well taken care of. Either way, anybody would be more than ecstatic to have it as their backyard.

On a different note, I wanted to mention something about photographic cliches. Photographic cliches are images that are created with motifs that are very common, such as sunrise/sunset beaches, mountaineous landscapes, rocks in water, autumn leaves, white fences - and lone trees. I've probably rattled off about 70% of the recent pictures you've seen on the web (and possibly on my blog). The truth is that in the current digital age, and the easy access to camera equipment/technology, its pretty hard to be original, especially for amateurs like myself. All this is a little depressing unless you're a creative genius, and so the philosophy has to change. So if you're not going to create the next original masterpiece, then I guess the thing to take note off is whether you're having fun, and whether you believe in what you created (or are creating) - IMHO, its all worthwhile as long as that requirement is met. Also, I strongly believe that once you are having fun and believe in what you're doing, you will end up creating that masterpiece at some point. Yes, the lone tree motif has been done many times before, but I'm fairly confident its not that rampant in landscapes of Jamaica (I hope). This is my thought process in the ever changing, saturated world of photography of today. What is your approach?