I have been working for many years as a Scientific Researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), and this job has allowed me to develop three of my great passions: science, travel, and photography.
Whenever I leave home, whether for work or pleasure, I try to bring along my beloved and quite battered Canon EOS 7D Mark II, along with a whole assortment of lenses I’ve acquired over time, and I try to reflect the beauty and majesty of this world we live in. After a lot of back and forth, one of the things I’ve realized—and I know it’s a cliché, but it’s true—is that you don’t need to take great trips to exotic and distant places to find this beauty. Often, it is right around the corner and you fail to appreciate it because it has become routine from seeing it every day.
I have found beauty in both near and distant landscapes, as well as in the different species of animals and flowers. One only needs to pause a bit, disconnect from the daily rush, and look at the world calmly. On this website, I try to show the beauty that I have seen over time.
The work I do also involves developing all the outreach aspects, which I consider fundamental and essential since my salary is paid with public funds. For this reason, for a few years now I have added a GoPro to my photography backpack (first it was a 3 and now it's a 5 Black Edition) and a DJI Mavic Pro drone, with which I try to show different aspects of the work we do when we go out on campaigns around the world. The videos on the page are the fruit of this outreach effort.
One of my other passions that straddles science and photography is astrophotography. Ever since I was a kid, the sky has always fascinated me. An unconditional follower of the program Cosmos: A Personal Voyage From Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, I have always wanted to understand why space is the way it is and to be able to admire its incredible beauty. I manage the first part by reading everything I can (and manage to understand, which isn't much) about astronomy, while I have achieved the second part through astrophotography. I have always wanted to telescope, but for various circumstances, I never ended up buying one. And now I am glad I didn't. Instead, I have a small altazimuth mount, an astromodified digital camera, a 135 mm photographic lens, and a few filters that allow me to photograph deep space and the various elements found within it by doing wide-field photography. That is to say, I do not focus on one specific object, but rather place it in a certain spatial context, which I find very enriching because it allows you to see the big picture.
Yes, if by any chance you want to talk to me, you can always find me at santigiralt at gmail.com (Change the «at» to «@» and remove the spaces before and after the at sign and you will have my correct email).