The enlightenment of snow

The winter came late this year, when the first snow covered Göteborg it was already the 5th of december. However, the soft white blanket of snow did not last for long, the morning after the city was back to its normal appearance, grey with a hint of moist rain. Hopefully, there will be more snow soon.

The enlightenment of snow

The fresh white blanket

And yes, I have an announcement. This blog have been treated as a bear in its winter lair the past months, I beg you pardon for the lack of new updates. I have lost my inspiration to take new photos, the last months my photos have just turned out dull and expressionless. But I will find my way to inspiration once again. Also, I have moved, lost my computer and lived a life without internet access, if that is some form of forgiving excuses.

Please listen to Aqualash – They Say Surrender

A beautiful song and a source of reflection

Winter's end

I was out walking in the slippery snow slush in the city a couple of days ago. I haven't used my camera so much the past week, mainly because of the lack of time, I have been working, but the other day I carried a compact camera with me. I took a picture which had a great resemblance with one of my photos from the past summer. I did not think of the similarity at that moment, but when I came home and compared the two photos I saw that I had exactly the same idea and point of view six months ago. The differences, among other things, are the weather and the surroundings. But it is going to get better and warmer, even though it will take some time. In a month or two we will be at the winter's end, but before that, I will be out at the sea.

Contrast

For me, my photo archive is sacred. It contains so many memories of the past, that I would be devastated if I lost them. But, I am quite lazy when it comes to backups and making paper copies of my photos. I should learn of the history, a few years ago, when I kept all my photos in the folder "My pictures" and Windows crashed, it took me almost one week to restore my archive. Which, by that moment, only contained about 3 000 pictures. Nowadays the number of photos in my archive comes to almost 60 000 pieces, of which I have a backup for about 50 000 of them.

So, why am I telling this to you? Well, it is because of two complete different reasons. Firstly, one of my new year resolutions will be to take more paper copies and backups of my photos. That isn't so hard to accomplish, I just need to write it down so I will remember it. Secondly, this explanation will be a little bit more diffuse, if I ever lose my pictures, many memories which never ended up in front of the camera also will be lost. You see, when I look at my pictures, I can imagine the past event, all the circumstances around the photo, how it smelled, who was there and parts of what was said. In other words, I can recreate many memories and situations with my photos. I am a person who tend to focus more on the small details rather than the big picture, but with all my memories of the details I can re-experience past memories once again. It is never advisable to live in the past, but by forgetting about your history you never will learn anything or be able to see things in retrospective. If something, or somebody, is forgotten, then they cease to exist.

A couple of days ago I took my camera for a walk in the cold weather. The camera showed a weird behavior during these winter walks, I had a hard time to get the auto focus to work, but I believe that the intense cold temperatures was the reason for this malfunction. I took some photos of the setting sun over Göteborg and Älvsborgsbron. The midwinter solstice was yesterday, so now the days will become longer and brighter, even if it is hard to believe at the moment. Outside my window it is minus seven degrees Celsius and even if the lights from the city does it best to brighten up the sky, it is very dark out there.

Bright and cold

A contrast to this midwinter sun over a frosted sea is the sunsets in the Argentinian jungle. The picture below show the sunset at Rio Parana Guazú in October. It was very beautiful, I just wish I had taken more photos on board.

Rio Parana Guazú