"There's a Chinese restaurant across the square, here on the left you have an Indian, and close by, there's an Italian..." - In case you did not guess I'm in a small city in the middle of Sweden...


I once said something like this to a colleague before her 1'st trip: "your credit card is your best friend... In case something goes wrong you can always rent a car and drive back home"... This crossed my mind today when it took me more than one hour to find my car rental company desk at the Stockholm airport...

What if you can´t find a rental company?... Well, you'd better not be in your 1'st trip and be aware that worse things can happen... Things like getting into an hotel room and not finding the bed...

Talking about that, i finally got the car, drove for 3 hours and finally got to the hotel... The bedroom had a bed... But it was the 1'st time I got a room with a single small bed, smaller than the sofa bed from the other time but let's not talk about that...

Two days have passed, Scandinavia still has the best ligth one can wish for... I was forced to pass on two amazing sunsets before actually being able to go out and shoot... When I finally did, nature greeted me with a snow storm...

"Can I let the visitors in?..." - I've just attached the last picture tag... And barely had time to take some pictures of everything ready...

The next couple of hours where faster than I can remember... So here it is for the ones that were there and I barely had time to talk with and the ones spread all over the world: Thank you all!!!...

Today I finally went out, to the middle of nowhere, for 15 minutes and shot one image just to get the feel of it again... What's coming next?... I'll go out to shoot again in the morning and then we'll see...

"all you've ever wanted was ..." - this is just an extract from a song... Yes, I do hear Linkin Park and heavier stuff from time to time, mostly when I need to focus...


During the last month or so, i might have written several posts, starting with... have a great wolf day... bye, have a safe trip home... I hope we meet in India some time... you've been selected by a computer to be hand searched along with your property... i do hate Christmas and new years... i'll have a sam adams winter brew... pedantic... invisible light... coming back for a little more... this is the cover for that magazine... tell me to go...

In summary: I've been working like crazy... At the same time I'm preparing an exhibition and to elevate the odds even further my pictures made it into the cover of a magazine... In the middle of all this, I really feel I miss having time to go out and take pictures... It's been almost two months now...

"Watch out!... The car in front of us is sliding!..." - My mate, alerts me for the car sliding from one side to the other of the road on I80... We are driving on a freezing rain storm, trying to get to New York...
The car finally stops on the right side of the road and the young girl on the wheel seams ok as we drive by... After some minutes she overtakes us as if she was driving on dry weather... I fight with myself for a couple of miles, we see another car spinning on the road... I get scared and end up deciding that we should abort our plans and drive back to the hotel...

This is the 2'nd time I pull back in two days... I can remember going through insane limits several times... Driving long distances at insane speeds, climbing alone without climbing skills and safety equipment, you name it... Today even a short walk through the woods seamed to scare me as I heard the trees cracking due to ice... Maybe I'm watching to much tv and paying to much attention to weather.com... Maybe I'm more of a grown up, than I thought I was several posts ago...

"With the storm that's comming tomorrow, all this snow will be gone due to rain and wind..." - We're chatting with a cross coutry skier at Ricketts Glen State Park PA, it's sub freezing and we're walking on several inches of powder snow...

"This is this years first snow" - he continues - "I love winter time in this place"... I can understand him, I think to myself as we walk away... Except for our footsteps we hear nothing but silence... As usual, as I get immersed into these places I stop feeling the cold weather and my mind starts finding images on every turn of the way...

Later on, the respect for nature, trail conditions and obviously fear, made us back off after only the first one of several dozens of waterfalls...

"but sir, this is a Lincoln!!!..." - I'm at the the car rental park in Newark airport and when I see the car that was reserved for me I ask for something different...
It was not my intention to offend of of the crown jewels of US auto industry, but the car just seamed too big and clumsy... But considering that we had a considerable amount of luggage we took it... As with any other car, after a short trip, I had forgotten about about how it looked or felt...

Until... On out fourth day in the Pocono Mountains region we where forced to leave the office on the middle of the day during a snow storm... After removing some inches of snow from the windshield, and trying to find my way out of the parking lot (it's difficult to tell where's the road when everything looks white) I drove slowly to the hotel, wishing I was driving something else... Somewhere else...

Later on I could not stay in the hotel, I picked up the camera and used it as an excuse to walk in the woods under falling snow... It's true, I tend to find myself in strange places... Kneeling down on soft snow and feeling the cold breath of nature was all I needed...

“” We could go to the end of the world, but today we’ll just go to the office”… - This thought comes to my mind several times whenever I enter my car in the morning and turn the key…

I have written before about my contradiction of loving the pure outdoors and driving a 4x4 that pollutes more that normal cars… Driving on it to the office every day, acts as a reminder that there is a big world out there, far away from the usual maze of chaos and conference calls…

I know, there are probably better ways for reminders, but I can only act rationally during a small percentage of my time…

“sorry, it’s my 1’st day at the job, I’ll have to ask my boss”… - I’m the only client at a roadside restaurant, and asked if they had ½ bottles of red wine…

Strange enough, this is the 1’st time I talk to someone in the last 12 hours… I spent the day searching for images, minding my own thoughts (or their absence)… Had I not found something to trigger my inspiration, I’d end up picking up one from the maze of ideas that cross my mind as I write this in my old paper book…

Being here, makes me thing about my desire of being anonymous from time to time, being the person that arrives in the night, asks for food and a glass of wine and departs into the night leaving no trace…

In fact, I’ve been doing this through life thinking that one day this part of me will be over, due to the simple fact that I’ll grow up… But grown-ups don’t climb to the top of a hill just to salute the end of another day. They don’t walk in the mud and don’t lie down in the floor just to see the trees touching the sky...

I look at my wine glass and remember that only grown-ups should drink…

“we won’t have mushrooms to photograph this year, you know”… - António salutes me when I arrive in the extreme northeast of Portugal for one of his autumn workshops…

I had spent much of the time during my 500 km drive from Lisbon wondering about potential images, and yes much of them involved mushrooms…

It’s funny, how photography turns our instincts around… blue skies and sunshine are boring, whereas rain and ice are welcome, eating is not that important and time runs faster in the first and the last hours of the day…

For some time I tried to shoot sunlit scenes as if they where under the rain, but it’s a fact that whenever we are to obsessive in bending reality into our hard minded vision, we loose sight of what reality has to show…

"some people have the capacity to dream, some people have the capacity to make their dreams come true..." - one of my gym trainers urges us to push our limits further...

The sentence and the situation is completely off topic, but it made me think that lately I'm a little confused on what my dreams are... It's a fact I've not been dreaming much and obviously I'm not working towards making my dreams come true... The fact that I stopped writing for some time is also a sign that I've been living too much in the real/hard/concrete side of things...

At that point, in the middle of trying my best without falling apart I tried to think about one dream that would be hidden in the deepest realms of my memories... Only one thing came to my mind: "Everest"...

What do I mean with that? Well I don't know... Thinking about it again, it's a fact that mount Everest comes to my mind from time to time... Seeing it, flying over or climbing it are possible ways of making the idea more concrete, but for now, I'll leave it as it is... The basic form of a dream...