A local photographer for your days in Argentina

Austral is a booking service for local photographers, videographers and drone pilots in 20 destinations across Argentina, with sessions from $110. You choose the place and the kind of session, you see the starting price before you commit to anything, and the person who answers already works where you will be standing.

Argentina rewards local knowledge because the places people travel to be photographed answer to different owners. The national parks — Nahuel Huapi, Los Glaciares, Iguazú, Tierra del Fuego — are run by the Administración de Parques Nacionales (APN), which sets its own conditions for commercial photography and filming. Provincial reserves such as Península Valdés have rules of their own, every winery and estancia decides whether an outside photographer may work on its land, and every drone flight falls under the Administración Nacional de Aviación Civil (ANAC). Each destination page names the authority, links its rules and says when they were last checked.

The light is the other half. The seasons run opposite to the northern hemisphere: summer is December to February, when the Patagonian evening light lasts late and Buenos Aires is hot enough to push sessions to the first and last hours of the day. Winter, June to August, brings snow to the Andean lake district, and the wind on the Patagonian steppe decides more sessions than the clouds do. The seasonality section of every destination says which months to aim for and which to avoid.

Sessions run from a half-hour headshot to a full wedding day with film and drone coverage, and take in proposals, couples, families, elopements, tango sessions, fiestas de 15 and commercial work for wineries, estancias, hotels and restaurants. The exact fee is confirmed in writing before you pay and covers the editing and a private gallery delivered on a stated date, from 72 hours for real estate photography to 8 weeks for wedding videography.