Madeira
Madeira is sold as Funchal and photographed everywhere else. The island is a volcano with a road around the outside and a ridge down the middle, and the thing that makes it worth the flight is that the ridge is usually above the cloud: at Pico do Arieiro, at sunrise, you are standing in clear sun looking across a floor of cloud with two other peaks coming through it. That is a specific place at a specific hour, and the small car park at the top is full well before the sun is up. The rest of the island divides into weather. Fanal, the laurel forest on the north-west plateau, only works in fog — on a clear day it is a field with trees in it — which makes it the one location that is genuinely rescheduled rather than merely hoped for. Several of the levada walks now charge for entry through the forestry authority, and which ones changes, so it is checked rather than assumed. And the honest note for anyone booking a beach session: Madeira has almost no sand. Porto Santo, forty minutes away by air, has nine kilometres of it.
Madeira has no off season in the way the mainland does — it is fifteen to twenty-five degrees all year — but it has two climates at once, and the north coast can be in rain while Funchal is in sun. The cloud inversion that makes Pico do Arieiro work is most reliable from late spring to early autumn. Fanal wants the wet months. June and July bring the Atlantic haze that softens everything, and the second half of August is the driest.
Here is where to shoot in Madeira, with ideal times and permit notes.
The third highest point on the island, reachable by car, and above the cloud layer more mornings than not. The whole thing is a logistics problem rather than a photographic one: the drive up is forty minutes of hairpins in the dark and the parking is gone by the time it is light.
Thousand-year-old laurel trees on an open plateau, in cloud. The fog is not an inconvenience here, it is the subject: without it the location is unremarkable, which is why a Fanal session carries a reschedule clause rather than a wish.
The eastern tip: red and ochre rock, no trees, sea on both sides. It is the driest and most exposed part of the island and looks like nowhere else on it.
Where you are staying, and a real location in its own right: painted doors in the old town, a cable car up to Monte and a harbour that faces south. Useful on the days the mountain is closed in.
These come under the Madeira rate: a photographer travels out from the city at no extra charge, and the session is priced exactly as it would be in Madeira itself.
Almost no sand on Madeira itself — the coast is rock and pebble, and the sea pools at Porto Moniz are the swimming. Porto Santo, forty minutes by air, has nine kilometres of sand and is a separate day.
Several now charge for entry through the forestry authority, and which ones has changed more than once. It is checked when the session is planned rather than assumed from an old blog post.