Photographing the Canary Islands: Volcanoes, Dunes and Winter Sun

Tenerife — altitude and contrast

The biggest island and the most varied, because it has a 3,700-metre volcano in the middle of it creating several climates at once.

Teide National Park is the reason to come. You drive up through the cloud layer and come out above it into a caldera of ochre, rust and black rock. The sea of cloud below is what makes these photographs unlike anything else in Spain.

The Anaga laurel forest in the north-east is the opposite: a prehistoric cloud forest of moss and fog, cool and green and enclosed. A session that visits both has more range than most entire countries offer.

What to know: altitude hardens the light and drops the temperature sharply. It is genuinely cold at 2,000 metres, in August. And the north of the island is often cloudy when the south is clear — which is useful if you know it and frustrating if you do not.

Gran Canaria — sand and ridges

Sometimes called a continent in miniature, which is marketing, but the range is real.

The Maspalomas dunes are a protected field of moving sand running straight into the Atlantic. Five minutes in and the resorts vanish behind a ridge; what remains is sand, sky and the line between them. It is the simplest location in our whole catalogue and one of the strongest — and it only works at the two ends of the day, because dunes need raking light to read as dunes at all.

Roque Nublo is an eighty-metre basalt tower near the island's highest point, often standing above the clouds with Teide visible across the water. Half an hour's walk in, which filters out most people.

Lanzarote — the strangest of the three

The most distinctive island for photographs, and the least like a holiday brochure.

The Timanfaya lava fields are the product of eruptions between 1730 and 1736 that buried a quarter of the island. Three centuries later almost nothing grows on them. Black and rust ground, nothing else in the frame, and a colour no other Spanish location offers.

La Geria is a valley of vines each planted in its own pit of black gravel behind a crescent stone wall — thousands of them, repeating away across the ground. It photographs as pattern from a distance and as sculpture up close.

The technical thing about Lanzarote: black volcanic ground absorbs light rather than bouncing it. Faces need to be turned toward the sun or lifted, or they underexpose against a bright sky. Pale clothing reads strongly here; dark clothing disappears entirely.

Which island for what

• The most variety in one trip — Tenerife.
• The single strongest location — Maspalomas, on Gran Canaria.
• Photographs that look like nowhere on earth — Lanzarote.
• Honeymoons — Tenerife or Lanzarote; Gran Canaria's south is more resort-heavy.
• Families — Gran Canaria, for the beaches and the easier logistics.

When to go

November to March. That is the whole point of these islands. Reliable sun, mid-twenties, and it is the only part of Spain where that is true.

Summer works too but has no advantage over the mainland, and July and August bring the crowds and the prices.

The trade winds blow year-round on the eastern islands, which matters if hair and fabric are part of the plan. It is usually calmer in the early morning.

One practical warning

These are big islands with slow mountain roads. Teide is an hour and a half from the southern resorts; Roque Nublo is a drive plus a walk. A session that includes a mountain location is a half-day commitment, not an hour.

You can see all the islands on the locations map, and there is a seasonal guide covering how the Canaries fit against the rest of the country.