“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"…

"you migth be able to get there through the river, but it will take a long time..." - I had stoped in a grocery store in the Alvão Natural Park area in northern Portugal and the store keeper is telling me about how to get near one of the parks waterfalls...

Comparing the Portuguese natural park system with those of the US and Canada is like comparing an old Ford Model T with the most recent Mercedes S... Forget the cabin in the entrance of the park where rangers welcome you and give you all the information you need in order to find whatever place you're looking for...

In Portugal you are left with the joy of discovery, sometimes you find the places you’re looking for, sometimes you find something else, often that not you meet interesting people that are glad to help you find what you’re looking for… This approach although romantic and closer to someone that is looking for the subtleties of places off the beaten track is only ruined by the lack of care the Portuguese government shows towards the conservation of natural areas...

Anyway, after walking some kilometers I got near the place I was looking for, but the vantage point from where I wanted to shoot the falls was too difficult to get to without risking falling some hundred meters into a frightening gorge… Where I in the US, I’d have a walking path to get me just there and a guide that would tell me the right time of day and where to place my tripod for the best shot…

“heck I’ll have to come back with more time, friends and climbing equipment!!!...” – The last rays from the sun where striking the earth as the full moon rose above the horizon and I still had some hundred kilometers to drive to my next destination…

“after the cities we’ve crossed during the trip I don’t know if I want to visit New York” – We where on our last day before coming back home, looking down from Seattle’s Space Needle when Patricia drew some conclusions regarding North American cities…


There’s a big difference between European and North American cities. In Europe, we are assured that every city builds it’s identity from the course of thousands of years and all the buildings and stories they left behind. In North America, time still did not play its role in defining each city’s identity. I can associate different ideas to each city, but they are more influenced by people and the way they live in each place…

More and more, cities look pretty much the same everywhere I go… They exist near the airports I fly to… But almost disappear from memories when I get immersed into the wilds...

“he usually spends nine months a year traveling all over the world and stays at home for tree months mostly to test pick up new equipment”… The attendant at the Art Wolfe gallery in Seattle had just answered my question on the amount of time Art usually spends traveling around...

Art is an extreme case of someone that does what I’d like to do with the added bonus of being successful and well payed. I left his gallery wondering about what would be right sequence of steps to get there… I know I might have the image creating potential, but all the rest and mainly the question on how to be a photographer along with being able to pay the bills and having the power to decide on whatever images I want to create turn a single step into an unbeatable barrier…

On the other side is Nuno, the Portuguese biker traveling along the Pan American Highway (check his website here), doing his destiny just out of the will to be free…

Although in extreme positions Art and Nuno are similar in the sense of disturbing my peace of mind. “What am I doing here?” is a common question as three weeks after coming back from the Rockies reality really hurts my temporary sense of freedom…

“We have rooms available for two nights, but after that you have to leave because we’ll be closing for the season….” - The man at the front desk of the St. Mary Lodge kindly informed us regarding our possibilities for staying in the east side of Glacier National Park (US – Montana)…

This did not sound too bad after the having heard from the customs officers at the US border that it would be difficult to find something open in the east part of the park this time of the year… The border would also close in the next day…

The rain did not come back, but the strong winds in the region prove to be worse than rain for the simple purpose of creating images… The trip needed an alternative schedule as we started counting backwards towards the end of the holydays… Does my writing sound depressing?... Well I may be…

"Glaciers recede a couple of meters every year, if you come here in 150 years, you’ll be having a boat trip instead of an Ice Explorer trip" - The guide at the Columbia Ice Fields is letting us know about some facts while driving us up the glacier in some kind of bus that seams to have came out of a science fiction movie...

Most of the time we take what we see for granted, but it’s a fact that the world is changing and what we saw during the trip will no longer be there if we ever go back...

I’m back to my daily life now, and as everybody may figure out my posts are coming out a little too late... Everything went too fast during the trip in such a way that each night I would fall asleep without the strength to write at the same rate we where fed with new experiences...

I left every place wishing to come back for more and less... More time, experiences, light, weather, water on waterfalls, snow... Less tourists...

As we travel south from Jasper to Banff there’s a notorious increase in the number of tourists, wanting to have less tourists feels quite contradictory as I’m a tourist myself and I have no more rights to go to those places than all the others... Still I’d like to see Lake Louise without the "Fairmont Chateau" and all the man made infrastructures built around it... Although in a different league, this place left me with the same sensation of a "dominated piece of nature" as the Niagara Falls did...

Amazingly, Yoho National Park is just 25 km west of Lake Louise and although the tourist buses still get there, there’s some sensation of isolation in the air that puts this place in the role of those that I can go back to over and over again...

Heck... What am I going in the office!..

“I quit my job, rented my house and will be spending the next 18 months going from Canada’s northern territories to Argentina by bicycle” – We finally found a Portuguese since starting the trip and this one had a big story to tell…

All over the world I met a reduced set of persons with the right proportion of courage and insanity in order to jump into the adventures that most of us dream of…

Sometimes we say that in the next day “we’ll radically change life”… But after a night of sleep we loose courage and there we go again to the same routine all over again…

We saw Nuno going away to continue with his venture with different mind sets… José was probably thinking about how much he would like to do the same, Maria was questioning herself on how would such a person manage to pack all the clothes needed for the trip and still be able to carry them on a bike… I found my comfort level troubled again by facing someone that had enough courage to take the “radical step”…