"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...

"the fact that this summer has been quite mild is not that bad, as we did not have as many problems with fire as we did in the past..." - I recal hearing this on tv as I drive to my home town (its more like a very small village)...

I don't know why, but I tend to think a lot about photography while driving... This time, besides fire, I'm thinking about why I don't have created a single image around my home town...

When I was young I was forced to spend the whole 3 months of my summer holidays in this place, near the geographical center of Portugal, a region known for the heat and the abundance of pine trees... Over the years I saw this region burning over and over again... The first fires I remember seeing, where just a small column of fire in the horizon, then some of them started to last days and even weeks and as the time passed by the whole area around my home town was burned several times...

I remember being small and looking up at pine trees amazed by their size... Now, the landscape is completely different most of the big trees are gone, and although this has been a mild summer, I can still see the traces of the areas that where recently burned...

Why don't I take pictures over there... Well perhaps I'm too busy when I go there, or my emotions just don't let me start...

The picture you see above was taken in 2004 at a Sequoia grove in Yosemite national park (US) during a managed fire... Over there fires are provoked in a controlled way in order to create the conditions for the survival of the giant Sequoias and to keep the forest clean... (in case you wonder, this is not what we are doing in Portugal)...

"f#$%&$k" - My own thoughts... It's 4 am, I'm driving to "Cabo da Roca" with the intention of shooting the moon set, the sky is clear when I leave home, but when I'm 500m from my destination everything gets covered in mist...

“Why do I do this”… I’m walking down the trail to my favorite spot in the darkness, seeing only the beam of my headlamp sweeping the mist… The trail is a 300m descent into a small rocky beach with loose rocks and some difficult obstacles along the way… I’ve been to this place more times than I can remember, but yes… This time I’m scared…

Half way down to the beach, the mist starts to clear and I’m able to see the moon again… For a while I’m thinking about the multitude of texts describing moments when nature is kind to photographers and to those who dare to leave the bed at insane times… But when I really get to the beach and start mounting the tripod for my first shoot the moon gets completely covered with clouds and never shows up again…

Without the moonlight I stay in the dark for more than one hour before I see the first traces of sunshine… Still I point my cameras somewhere and wait… Heck, I’m here so I’d better create some images anyway…

At 11h00, I finally feel I’m finished for the morning… Even if the weather doesn’t help, there’s so much to do "just" with stones…

"blue whale!!!..." - The Haukur Schooner's skipper, spots something in the horizon and before we can understand what's going on, he changes direction and rushes the engine...
I’m standing on a lamp at the bow (imagine a 50cm cube), it sounded like a good way for shooting above everybody’s heads but as the boat increases speed this suddenly becomes an odd way for training my balance… But ok, I continue looking towards the horizon and try to harmonize with the boat’s movements.

We’d already seen dolphins and a humpback whale… And after those I thought I could already go back home with stories to tell… I wasn’t much worried about pictures as I was aware I still did not have the training or the skill to do the kind of pictures I’d like to do so I was more worried on enjoying the moment…

Whales come to the surface every 5 minutes or so, sometimes I’d fire a burst of pictures, sometimes I’d just forget I was holding a heavy camera and used all my senses to try to build memories... The spray of a whale that just emerged, the sensation of its size compared to us and our boat, the surrounding sounds and and the whale songs, the cold wind, the sea...

The fact that we are almost at arms reach to the biggest animal on earth (even bigger that any dinosaur that ever lived on the planet), makes us feel privileged and humbly small at the same time… The fact that we can share the same waters makes me wonder why we are doing the atrocities we do this world… Still whales look calm and serene; they just keep on going singing their stories trough their seasonal trips around the world…