From 6 September to 12 October 2013, I walked the pil­grim­age route known as the Camino Francés (“The French Way”), or sometimes less formally called the Camino de Santiago. The nearly 500-mile route begins in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France, and runs westward across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela. Since the 9th century of the common era, Christians have visited Santiago seeking spiritual benefits believed to accrue from being in close proximity to Saint James the Greater’s mortal remains which are purportedly interred in the city’s cathedral.

While many pilgrims still travel the Camino for that traditional reason, others are motivated by a personal spirituality or come in search of socializing, adventure, or rec­re­a­tion. Among sev­er­al factors that motivated me to walk the Camino was the desire to practice what I’ve called “mindful photography” (but which is more traditionally known as “street photography”)—photography that typically requires antici­pat­ing a fleeting, maybe even poignant, moment. This pho­to­graph­ic genre sig­nif­i­cantly differs from most landscape pho­tog­ra­phy in which a location may be "scoped out" for minutes, hours, days, or even seasons of the year in pursuit of ideal lighting and other natural conditions desired by the pho­tog­ra­pher.

The former photographic approach held greater interest for me because I conceive of the Camino as being fundamentally more than a trail or a landscape. Even viewed as a dynamic endeavor, the Camino is more than a hike or a walk—it is rather an ancient community into which the pilgrim enters. Yet it is not a traditional community in being rooted to a location, but one that’s constantly moving in the direction of Santiago.

I think it worth noting, though, one major difference between the modern Camino and its ancient counterpart. A medieval pilgrim walking to Santiago would have encountered a con­tin­uous stream of pilgrims coming toward him or her back to their homes across Europe. Today most pilgrims depart San­ti­a­go by some form of public transportation. And so vir­tually the only people seen walking in the counter-Santiago direction are the relatively few local residents who use their near-segment of the Camino as an exercise path. I mention this unusual phe­nom­e­non of a unidirectional procession be­cause I suspect that it further reinforces not only one’s sense of belonging to a pilgrim community, but that it also con­trib­utes to the so-called “energy of the Camino” that I’ve heard other pilgrims speak about. During my time on the Camino, I didn’t think much about this energy claim. But in hindsight I’ll note that re­gard­less of how much my feet hurt, or how poorly I’d slept the previous night, or even when stricken with gas­tro­en­ter­itis, there was never a day on which I did not want to walk. Perhaps some of that sense can be found in the images that I present in this gallery.

The photographs shown here run an aesthetic gamut from the “snapshot” to the “picturesque” to the “sublime.” I have in­cluded some admittedly mundane images because my interest is not merely to delight the eye, but to also tell stories. Some­times even an unremarkable image justifies its presence by what it contributes in that regard.

This gallery differs from the typical blogs of Camino pilgrims, as well as from the typical displays of photos by professional (or semi-professional/advanced amateur) photographers.

Pilgrim-produced blogs tend to be text-based, diary accounts of daily experiences on the Camino—highly detailed and highly

comprehensive. A blog may include few or many photographs, but one feels that the main purpose of the accompanying photos is to add a visual dimension to the textual narrative.

I would place such displays on one end of a scale in which importance of text most strongly outweighs that of images. At the other end of the scale is the case where images are most strongly given precedence over text—the situation typically ex­em­pli­fied by photographer galleries. There, each image is pre­sen­ted with only a minimal caption, if any. Each image is largely required to “speak for itself.”

The approach I’ve taken with this presentation of Camino images lies between these two extremes. Unlike the pilgrim blogs, this display is not driven by narrative, but simply by the chronological ordering of images whose selection is im­pres­sion­is­tic of my Camino experience.

On the other hand, the Camino gallery differs from typical pho­tog­rapher displays by providing a much longer caption for each image of which there are two forms. Each image is pre­sen­ted as a thumbnail (of width 200 pixels) on the current page and accompanied by at most a 3-line caption that in­cludes the location along with the date and time the image was made. Each corresponding larger image (each with height typically 600 pixels) is accompanied by a caption that may exceed 100 words.

I chose photographic equipment for this pilgrimage to min­i­mize weight and bulk without unduly sacrificing image quality, especially under low-light conditions.

• Camera: Sony NEX-6 (16.1 MP APS-C CMOS sensor)
• Sony E-mount 10–18mm f/4 OSS
• Sony E-mount 35mm f/1.8 OSS
• Tiffen Circular Polarizer, 62mm
• SLIK SBH-100 DQ Compact Ballhead Tripod

When not in use, the equipment, except for the tripod, was kept in a small fanny pack worn at my front for quick access.

The few opportunities that arose for using the tripod did not justify my carrying it 500 miles across Spain, despite its light weight. Travel to France immediately following the Camino’s com­ple­tion presented abundantly more situations where the tri­pod proved useful.

Most of the images were recorded in RAW format (although a few were exported from the camera as JPEG), but all were processed in Adobe Lightroom 5, and exported in JPEG format.

Full-sized images in the gallery can be accessed in either of two ways. Each such image has a thumbnail version on this page which when clicked will display the full-sized image and associated extended caption. Upon accessing a full-sized im­age, additional such images can be accessed by sequential for­ward or backward movement through the gallery using either each image’s web page navigational arrows (to left and right of each image) or your browsing device’s left/right arrow keys.

My thanks to Eileen Patch for her helpful comments on the above introductory remarks to this photo gallery.