In cities large and small all over Mexico, the town plaza is the cultural and social center of life. Plaza Machado in historic Old Town Mazatlan is one of the most enchanting of the plazas I’ve visited. Historic buildings surround the park-like plaza with its typically ornate ironwork kiosko. There are several restaurants with outside seating where guests can enjoy the usually mild evening weather of Mazatlan.
One of the things I enjoy most about visiting Mexico is hanging around the plaza in the evening. Teens and young adults meet and court, seniors sit on the benchs and talk old times, and whole families come out for an evening on the town.
The top photo above includes Café Pacifico, the oldest bar in Mazatlan, and one of the little pulmonia taxis that are unique to the city. To make the photo, I walked down one of the side streets a bit and used a slightly telephoto setting on a zoom lens. This let me compress the elements in the scene a little, and it allowed me to keep the lines of the architecture in correct perspective. Shooting right at dusk, I was able to balance what was left of light in the sky with the mutiple artificial light sources around the plaza. In the days of shooting film, it would have been almost impossible to filter this scene properly, but the auto white balance setting on my digital SLR needed only a little tweaking to render a pleasing color balance.
Are you a Mexico fan, too? Do you have a favorite town plaza somewhere?
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