Old warehouse

April 29, 2022 in photographs

Galicia, April 2022.

From the video A blizzard in spring: why timing trumps location in photography.

The calm during the storm

April 28, 2022 in photographs

Galicia, April 2022.

I found this composition during the recent blizzard we had around here. At that moment, the scene was clear, and I was capturing distracting elements in the frame besides the building and the rock.

I thought that was the best I could do in the field, and that I'd have to work the image in post to get rid of the distractions. Luckily for me, nature gave me a hand in the form of a cloud that created some beautiful foggy conditions for a few minutes. Enough for me to capture the scene with just the two elements I wanted to show.

Apartment tree

April 27, 2022 in photographs

Galicia, April 2022.

I took lots of pictures of this tree over the three days I got to spend up in the mountains, waiting for the snowstorm to hit.

And as it usually goes, the best image came at the very last day, at the very last minute. Just when the snow stopped, and the fog came.

Watch the video of my winter adventure in spring here.

Fortress

April 26, 2022 in photographs

Galicia, April 2022.

From the spring blizzard we had recently

A blizzard in spring: why timing trumps location in photography

April 26, 2022 in journal

The winter was over; or so I thought. A rare spring blizzard hit the mountains of Galicia, in NW Spain, and being just an hour away, I couldn't miss it. Because in photography, timing always trumps location and subject. An incredible couple of days spent in the snow, a time I used to make tons of images.

Windmills at night

April 25, 2022 in photographs

Castilla La Mancha, December 2021.

Photographing Don Quixote's Giants in La Mancha

Windy morning at the desert

April 24, 2022 in photographs

Alvord Desert, Oregon, September 2020.

Fence, misty morning

April 22, 2022 in photographs

Galicia, June 2020.

Pico Gilbo, II

April 21, 2022 in photographs

Riaño, March 2022.

See Pico Gilbo, I. Also, watch the video from Riaño, in the Picos de Europa mountains.

The shed in the yard

April 20, 2022 in photographs

Galicia, April 2022.

DSC07857, DSC07859, DSC07862, DSC07863 and DSC07864.

We must choose

April 19, 2022 in journal

Life is full of choices. Each of them takes us further down the road, never to find the same intersection again.

We all want to do a lot of things with and in our lifes. But that's not possible.

I'd love to have my own place, one I can call home; I'd also love to keep traveling, never really settling down.

I'd love to have the experience of having a kid; I'd also love to do the things I couldn't do if I had one.

Our lifes are finite, so we must choose. Some of these decisions scare us to the point of paralyzing us.

"The reason why fantasies of the future are so much more pleasant than doing them in the present, it’s because we get to hang on all of them. It is the choosing that is painful, choosing what we will do and what we don’t that most avoid doing."

-- from a podcast I listened to, whose name I forgot to write down :(

When I quit my job to become a full-time photographer, I had a fantasy: I'd travel the world, visit all continents, make images everywhere.

I wasn't so naive to think I'd travel so much, but I was expecting to go to many more places than I have ended up going to so far. In part because of the pandemic, which was a choice none of us wanted to take but were forced to.

Even though I'm still young enough to keep traveling for years to come, every time I decide to go somewhere, I'm also deciding not to go somewhere else. One decision at a time, I'm carving a path; one with many destinations, but one that will skip most of them.

I did not understand that one future comes at the exclusion of all others.

I had wanted two kids.

I had wanted to travel the world.

I had wanted to be the one to hold my mother’s hand at the end.

Everybody pretends that you only die once. But that’s not true. You can die to a thousand possible futures in the course of a single, stupid life.

-- No Cure for Being Human, Kate Bowler

Whether we want it or not, we must choose. We will miss on many, many things; we will get to do just a few, to experience a handful of them.

That's why it's so important to focus on what we do get to do, on what we do get to experience. And to share it with those people whose path didn't take them the same route.