Finding Peace

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Deep in the forest, where sunlight miraculously reaches through a maze of branches and warms up the budding flowers hidden in the shadow of old trees. The footpath lies ahead like an invitation.

On the rocky ocean shore, watching the sunset and listening to the wind singing its strange incantations. A song of hope, loss, death, life, everything that ever mattered compressed in one long melodic whoosh. Like the song of a mother from a never discovered tribe deep in the jungle.

Lying on my back in the field, watching the clouds move across the sky and transform as they pass. A giant shape shifting show on display for anybody and for nobody. Just watching. Just breathing. Just lying in the sun along with all other life forms.

Peace.

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Tina is hosting this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge on “Finding Peace”.

Interested in joining the Lens-Artists challenge? Click here for more information.

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Shadows in Monochrome

I’ve been this forest once.

The majestic canopy silently growing in the night. The ever-changing winds of winter. The moon and the stars.

The deep shadows of trees beneath trees. The trembling leaf ready to fall. All life unfolding quietly.

The beating heart of the woods.

Sometimes I remember being the forest.

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This week’s Lens-Artists challenge, led by Patti, is Shadows and Reflections in Monochrome. My small contribution is all about shadows.

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Cultivating Attention

Photography cultivates a certain awareness and attention to detail. You walk on the street, all senses awake. There’s this detail here and that situation over there. You can see things developing into something that could be a good photo. You anticipate. You position yourself in the right place and wait for the right moment.

Sometimes (in fact, many times) that place was far from being the right one. And the right moment passed before you could react. Or never arrived. But the experience is still yours to enjoy. It wasn’t pointless.

A Year In 12 Photos

This is my last post for 2022. December is often a month of reckoning, revisiting, and trying to make sense of what happened.

I need to accept how things are in order to go ahead and be prepared for how they could be.

I need to make peace with how things are in order to be able to turn them into what they could be.

Aren’t we all?

Playing With Texture

Textures speak to that deeper part of us that reacts and wakes up to sounds, touch, color, light and shadow. No words needed. Words can describe, explain, interpret, justify, but the emotional connection is already there.

Running my hand across the bark of tree trunks as I find my way into the forest, my eyes closed.

Exposure

I started out, as most of us do, being overly preoccupied with sharpness and focus. Of course, there’s a place for sharpness and focus and some compositions require them more than others. But there is also lots of scope for playing with them and sometimes leaving them behind. This is true even for documentary photography, where selective focus and graininess can produce amazing results.

For this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, Sofia dares us to show how we play with exposure in order to create mood, movement, and emotion. I have selected a few photos shot a few days back, in Brussels, at a procession organized for Dia de Muertos. I remember following the same procession three years ago, before the Covid pandemic.

The Call of the Mountains

This week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, hosted by Amy, is all about mountains.

In the mountains, I’ve felt at peace, exhilarated, grateful, exhausted, scared, lost. I walked endless trails that took me way out of my comfort zone. I found myself up on the mountain, in the wild, as it was getting dark, wondering how will I make it back down. I found myself in danger (just because I’ve put myself in danger) and felt my life hanging on a thread. I found myself so incredibly at peace with everything out there, me included. I felt that I belong.

All that sunshine

Photography has taught me to pay attention.

Pay attention to details but also to how these details combine to form a meaningful scene.

Pay attention to the quality of light and the juxtaposition of colors and textures.

Pay attention to what happens out there not just in my head.

The kind of photography that speaks to me

Anne’s question for this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge is “What’s your photographic groove?”. Well, that’s a question I’ve been asking myself quite a lot lately. And there’s a gap between the kind of photography that I’m currently doing (and feeling comfortable doing) and the kind of photography that would speak to me the most.