CLIMBING 'THE DOLPHIN' IN RODELLAR, SPAIN by Michelle Bienias
Photographer: Ignacio Ferrando Margelí of Abaco Digital Where: Rodellar lies km 60 NE of Huesca in Northern Spain close to the French border. It is located in a protected natural area named "Parque Natural de la Sierra y los Caos de Guara" What: Chiro Sanchez climbs “El Delfin” in Rodellar. If you look at the shape of the arch from below you can see it appears to be in the shape of a dolphin. click here to view fullscreenThere are 200 routes of steep, stamina climbing in one of Europe’s most famous climbing areas deep in the Sierra de Guara. Ferrando warns others not to try this if you aren’t a climber! “I do this with the help of professional climbers, they install all the necessary stuff to allow me to get there. Basically they put a static rope in one of the hooks that they use to get safe, then I climb up the rope with special stuff to do this. I stay a one meter of the end of the rope so I could see the arch from a good point of view, the problem was that I had nowhere to put my feet or hands to stabilize myself, and it was difficult to avoid making turns in the air...” How: “Making the pictures was not very difficult,” Ferrando says. “I used the rope to hang as a ‘virtual’ inverted monopod and shot the pictures with the camera near the rope at the same vertical position, and trying to do it at 90 degrees. I then took some vertical shots and the shots to the floor because my legs appear in all the pictures.” He stitched the pics with PTMAC and then exported them to Photoshop with layers formatted to edit the seams. He then used Photoshop and the ptools filters to edit the zenith and the nadir. Equipment: “I used the Nikon D2x and the sigma 8mm. Normally I use the Nikon 10.5 for my panos but for these I think that the 8mm is better and with the d2x it gives very good results.”
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