La Geria vineyards

The strangest agricultural landscape in Spain and one of the strangest anywhere. Because Lanzarote has almost no rain, vines are planted singly in conical pits dug into black volcanic gravel, each sheltered from the trade winds by a low crescent wall of stacked stone. Thousands of them, across a whole valley.

What that gives a photographer is repetition and rhythm: identical shapes marching away across black ground, with a single green vine in each. It reads as pattern from a distance and as something almost sculptural up close.

The black gravel is the technical thing to know. It absorbs light rather than reflecting it, so faces need to be turned toward the sun or lifted — otherwise the ground takes the fill light away and leaves people underexposed against a bright sky.