Farewell to 2010

Twilight Clouds over Kleifarvatn, Iceland

So 2010 has passed... One more year, full with stories, some good, some bad, some interesting, some boring, but that's the way things go. If we didn't have rainy days, we wouldn't give so much importance to the sunny ones. That's a metaphor for life... As far as landscape photography goes, we'd better turn it around because I actually prefer rainy days to those sunny ones with clear blue skies...

Anyway, photographically it has been a great year. The highlight was of course the trip to Iceland in July. I had been wanting to go back ever since I went there for the first time in 2007, and what a trip it was. This time I prepared the trip better than last time and it payed off nicely.

I had talked with some Icelandic photographers trying to know what were the best spots to see the amazing light show that was provided by the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano and even though I was too late for that, speaking to landscape photographer Orvar Thorgeirsson and visiting him at his gallery in Reykjavik was great. Apart from being able to check out his wonderful work, he gave me some great tips about several places that I wouldn't have been able to discover on my own.

I visited one of these places on my first day in Iceland. Kleifarvatn is a lake near Reykjavik, that provided me with one of the best sunsets I have experienced in my life. I arrived there at about 10:30 pm and there was no one there. There was great light everywhere. I literally did not know where to point my camera. On one side there was a small mound lit up by the reddish light of sunset, on the other there was the lake with beautiful clouds above that were colored pink as the sun went lower on the horizon. And the best thing is that there was no one there, I had the place to myself, so I ended up staying until almost 1 in the morning... The beauty of Icelandic twilight in the summer: great sunset light doesn't happen very often, as there are still lots of clouds and sometimes all you get is grey skies, but when it does it lasts for hours.

I share with you now one of my images from that twilight. The composition is pretty basic, but if there's one travel moment that I will remember from this last year, it's those huge pink clouds over the lake as the sun was setting. It may sound strange, but it almost seemed that Iceland was welcoming me back...

Happy 2011 everyone ! :)

How can we still be creative?

Painted Hand in Ansazi Ruin, Mystery Valley, USA

When I came back from my trip to the Southwest USA last year I came back wondering if it's possible for any photographer to be truly creative in places that have been photographed millions of times. Then I looked at some of my images from that trip and I thought that maybe I had some that I liked and to be honest, some of them were unlike anything I had seen before regarding those places. I was happy...

Until I saw a post in Guy Tal's blog... Guy Tal is a photographer whose work I've admired for quite some time now. In this post he had a photo of a painted hand in Cedar Mesa, and even though it's in black and white, it reminded me of one of those photos I took during that trip. It's not even in the same place, mine is was taken in Mystery Valley, in an Anasazi ruin called Many Hands, during a photo trip I did with a Navajo Guide, but the resemblance in composition is pretty obvious.

Now my concern isn't really who took his photo first or if one can be considered a copy of the other. I hope Guy does not think, if he ever sees my photo, that I tried to copy from him, because when I shot this image I did not even know about Guy's photo. But this raises an interesting question: how can you still be creative today ?

I mean, one may think that he has a great photo only to know that it has been shot before. Or that someone else will shoot a similar image in the future without ever knowing that the image looks like another one that already existed.

A few months have passed and I still have no answer to this question. However, I know that it is indeed possible to be creative. That's the beauty of photography (and all art). When you think you have seen all possible angles of a subject, someone else comes and presents it to you like you had never seen before. These are the moments when I feel real joy. It's when I feel that the world is a place full of possibilities and that they're all here for us to experience in our own personal way.

So I've actually given up trying to answer the question. I just shoot what moves me, trying to be as open as I can to all those possibilities, and I hope that maybe one of those shots can one day help someone see the world a little differently.

Unknown Heroes

Two months ago I came back to Portugal from a great trip through the Colorado Plateau, in the Arizona and Utah states of the United States of America. It was an amazing trip, through six National Parks and some amazing landscapes, and I was able to take a lot of photos. My friends here loved them, they said they were amazing photographs, but the real truth is that one of the main reasons the photos look great is because the places themselves are fantastic. And the reason these places are fantastic is because lots of people care for them, and wanted to protect them.

More than one hundred years ago, some people in the USA came up with this weird idea that Nature is something that fuels our spirits. They defended that the wild places that still existed in America should be protected from commercial exploitation, and should be made public so that all people, regardless of age, religion or position in society could benefit from them. Thus was born one of the greatest ideas of America: the National Parks. And the funny thing is that all it took was people with a love for certain places and with the ideas and initiative to make things happen.

Now the photo you see in this post is not from America. It's from my own country, Portugal, from our only National Park, Geres. The reason I chose this photo for this post is because I recently found out that in my own country there are also people with this kind of initiative and driving force. In fact, I feel privileged and happy to count one such person as a friend of mine.

She's just like you and me, she has a job to where she goes to every day. However at certain times, she packs her stuff, gets in her car or in a train and travels in our country, in order to volunteer to certain nature protection activities. Whether it's helping to recover wild animals in recovery centers, or participating in reforestation activities, she does her bit. Her enthusiasm has inspired me to start helping as well in any way I can, and I am looking forward to participate in some of these activities as well. I know there are more people like her, but still I wish there were even more. These are the people that make things happen behind the scenes. It was this kind of efforts and enthusiasm that led to the creation of the National Park idea in the United States long ago.

People look at some of my photos and they see the natural beauty of the landscapes. For some time, that was all I saw as well, but now I see something more. I see these unknown heroes that have worked so hard to keep these places so beautiful. So here's to them all. Thank you for your efforts and hard work.