"it's snowing in Sanabria..." - The teaser in Antonio's announcement for his workshop in an unknown region in the north of Spain shows up in my inbox, in the middle of thousand of emails regarding impossible missions, never ending procedure chains and clients on fire...

Although it's a fact that at the distance of two days it would be impossible to leave everything and just go... These sentences bring my image seeking instincts back to light...

In the last two weekends I was able to reestablish some shooting habits, and to visit some of my usual loved places... I always drive back home asking myself how can I live without it, and how small will my life time be in order to enjoy all of this... And... Aaarghhh!!!!... Today, I'm completely exhausted, looking at the moon rising as the sun disappears on the other side of the horizon... Offices with windows have this problem of showing us what we're loosing...

Well... I'll be traveling soon... that's a good thing...

"when are you flying to India?..." - my CEO, meets me at the coffee machine and surprises me with a strange and revealing question...


"well... I still don't know..." - my answer is vague enough not to show that I still don't know what he's talking about... But, if he said so...

Two weeks passed on and in the middle of the never ending and increasing level of stress I now know that I'll probably be traveling again... These last times have been completely devoid of image creation moments, and for some strange reasons I also stopped editing my work... Sometimes I feel like if the strange element that powered my will to succeed as a photographer just ran out...

"i'll be going now..." - Inha's wet eyes remind me this is her last day in the office, I'm just back from holydays and as usual the stress of coming back makes me forget what's really important...

Inha is not going to travel along the Pan-American Highway by bike nor hike the Himalayas in search of the perfect light... She is departing for love... This seams even harder than any other trip...

So here goes another brave person who decided to take hold of destiny... This time she's not just somebody I met in a remote location or someone I read about in a magazine, she's one of those real friends that will be hard to let go...

"remember, the world is too small nowadays, we'll be just around the corner..."

“there are some issues that we’d better not justify completely”… - I can’t stop reminding a statement from one of my mentors that goes something like this…

As someone that likes to do landscape photography and enjoys the outdoors, I have my own contradictions… I drive a car every day, which pollutes more than needed; I like to drive in off road tracks that should be left to nothing else but silence and I enjoy snowboarding in resorts that where created at the expense of destroying entire ecosystems...

I’m in the French Alps, with all the commodities for arriving to the top of most peaks, but unfortunately for me snowboarding does not mix with photography thus all images will have to be kept in memories… One day, I’ll have to come back to the mountains with the time and means for letting others see what I’ve been gathering all over time…

“you should go… live the fantasies!...” – the comment in my last post echoed in my mind through the last week… We are almost on new year’s eve and I tend to get too introspective this time of the year…

From my student days I remember that whenever I’m stuck with a problem for too long, I end up figuring the solution in my dreams… Heck!!!... I don’t remember the last time I dreamt with something…

As time goes by, we tend to force ourselves to live too much into the real side of things, and due to this we train ourselves into posing the correct questions upfront… Things like “how will I pay the bills without a regular job?” end up blocking the sight of all the good things that might come with a radical change…

These last months have been hard, and I have made them worse… I used to fight the world just to have five seconds of photographic quality time, but these last times I’ve been thinking too much and living too little…

Not living too much lately is the evidence I’m carrying through this passage in time… One more year and I’m still too far away… I might never get anywhere, but I should get going anyway…

"you should go hide..." - a wise voice from overseas suggests that a cottage somewehere near a lake in northern Ontario would be a bigger help than a jumbo sized cup of coffe...

I wrote and deleted this post serveral times... Every sentence I write sounds like something that I said before... I'm repeating myself when I say I'm tired and really need a trip out of here in order to get back to myself...

There are promisses that 2007 will start wildelly with a series of trips... The perspective sounds too far away to be real, but it's what I have for now...

Sometimes I think to myself I should grow up and get out of these traveling fantasies, but staying at home for too long is like cutting the fuel that makes me run after more and more experiences and story telling immages...

“is everything all right?...” – It’s almost mid night and someone asks me why am I still in the office…

“it comes and goes”… I think to myself while spending some time playing around with icons in my desktop after sending the last email… I’m tired and the trip back home looks longer than usual…

I finally get home and serve myself with a microwave heated delicacy along with the rest of the Australian white wine bottle that stayed in the fridge from the day before…

Late in the night, tired and high on alcohol, even the 3’rd class reality show shown on TV seams interesting… I’m not really seeing it, so I'm not to be blamed...

"i'm surprised that with so many expensive cameras at the company event, the pictures aren't any good!!!..." - My boss comments his perceived quality of the pictures taken at our annual company event...


Where we talking about cars, this would sound something like: "you have a Ferrari, why can't you drive faster than the rest of the crowd inside a traffic jam?"...

There's an annoying barrier between passionate and normal people in understanding that photography has different meanings rather than the common jargon of "capturing a moment" or worse than that "capturing reality"...

Generically, and risking being to critic, sometimes I feel that for normal people, photography is something you do with a camera... Whereas for someone passionate photography can be about experiencing the dance of nature and ligtht during their best moments, touching the invisible, discovering movement in the world's smallest details, feeling invisible in the middle of a crowd, discover someone's story, breaking limits...

Good equipment and sharp technical skills will probably get you nice pictures... You'll also get really bad ones, this is the way things go... Put passion into the equation and the experience will take you closer to yourself and far away from how good you camera is... Most probably 99,9% of your pictures will still suck... But what the heck! You'll be there for experiencing the world and when you do so you'll find out how 0,1% of your time may become timeless...

"you should come here on a better day, today the weather is not good enough for pictures"... - I'm thinking about the amount of times I've heard this, as the flooding in the center region of Portugal prevents me from getting to the place I wanted to explore...

I'm tired after a strange night with a little too much alcohol and less sleep than advised... The blue sky and the warm color of sunset are almost contradictory with the vision of a road disappearing under the water... I recall Antonio saying that there's some kind of light that drives photographers crazy and makes them wander around until they get something that can be matched with it... And here it was, but this time the strength was not there...

I could have driven my car through one meter deep waters in order to pursue some piece of destiny, but respect and some kind of fear kept me back...

Still I drove around, looking for something else to shoot, but... Too many thoughts blinded me: What am I doing here... Those clouds are amazing... Ups... Stay on the road... I can't help admiring those who depart with nothing in mind and just a glimpse of love in the heart...

"was Portugal a cake, this would be my favorite slice..." - Antonio starts the initial briefing of his photo workshop in Montesinho Natural Park, one of the most remote locations in inner Portugal...

Tree days of intense rain and shooting went through faster than my ability to absorb all that there was to experience in this place under the weather's endearing influence...

It's a fact: Photography changes our perception of the world. Comfort or the absence of it gains a completely new meaning, rain and cold are no more than opportunities for the creation of images and strange enough they are usually the best when it comes to color details... Being wet is part of the process just as letting our equipment through the same "level of abuse"...

In the end I drive back home for eight hours in the rain... The loneliness of an empty car under heavy rains looks like the ideal environment for meditation... "Coming back to real life is becoming harder each time"…