Shutting out the 'busy' world

White Stork leaving nest, Alcacer do Sal, Portugal

During Christmas Holidays I took the time to read the eBook 'Close to Home' by photographer Stuart Sipahigil. It's a nice read, you can finish it in an afternoon, it has great photos, and it talks about something that I sometimes experience: how hard it is to find photographs on your own 'backyard'.

According to the book, this happens because of our difficulty to find something extraordinary out of our daily lives. We are so accustomed to the routine that it's really easy to pass by good photographs without noticing them. I believe this happens because we do not stop and give ourselves time to see what's in front of us. Not to look, but to really see. Absorb it, feel it with all our senses.

I work in an office building. Everyday I see people come and go out of the building, queuing up for the elevators to take them to their workplace, coming down for a ritual smoke or coffee, and talking to their beloved ones or their bosses on the telephone. How often do these people stop to look at what's around them ? Not very often, I imagine... They just don't have the time... Neither do I sometimes, because I'm one of them (apart from the ritualistic smoke... I don't smoke).

Looking back, I feel that most of my best photos were taken either during vacations or on photo tours. But it's not because I get to travel to new and exciting places. It is because those are times when I am able to completely shut out the busy world around me. No, I do not stop talking to my beloved ones when I'm on vacation, but I keep that to a minimum. One phone call every two or three days at specific times just to let them know I'm ok. No family visits, no work, nothing more. It's at those times when I'm able to absorb the world around me and try to make some sense of it, at least photographically.

Normally I keep daydreaming about how great it was if we were less busy and would be able to stop and see what's around us more. My new year's resolution is to stop daydreaming and actually do it. Not to come up with excuses that I don't have enough time to go out and photograph, but to make time for it. Schedule a day every week or so in which I do exactly what I would do if I were on vacations: shut out the 'busy' world and go out and experience the 'real' world no matter what.

I did that last saturday and even though I did not come up with photos that are absolutely astonishing, I managed to shoot some that I believe are nice. I share with you today one of those and hope you like it. And I leave you with a challenge: every now and then, take a day off that 'busy' world you live in, and go and feel like what the 'real' world is all about. You won't regret it...

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.