Few more minutes ...

... and a new year will be under way.

This is not a real post, not as my latest. I don't have a picture to post, I left my PC at home and took with me just a tablet. For you I have today only few words. I'll keep my headache for me.

I've just spent one of the cruellest days in the year: Christmas. I've swang between my parents' apartment and the one of my parents in law. Little time for thinking or doing anything else but eating and talking out loud to make myself heard in a crowd of shouting people. This is my typical Cristmas day, I can't help it. Everything happens quickly. Yet everything seems to last an ethernity. I would rather have spent it in several different ways, not least walking around my parent's old town with my gears in the hands. There will be time: that's what I say myself. But time goes by and you can't recover it.

I doubt there will be anyone out there reading these words. In case, I wish you had better holidays than mine.

Time for retrospectives

And ... of course, it's about time to make some stats, to count our numbers, to look behind our shoulders and see all that we've been able to do. It's the simplest way to look at the glass and see it ... half full, instead of half empty.

Time to rest

Few hours more and this year, this long, hard, extenuating working year will be gone for ever. One more day and I'll disconnect, putting my tools back in the drawers for a short, well deserved break. I must confess to feel like a long distance runner who has patiently run for long before getting to the end of the track and, once there, looking far ahead, realizes there's still a lot of road to walk. The last mile is by far the longest one. In the  meantime my goals have changed, as almost everything else. One of the only fixed points, my polar star is photography that keeps me on track.

There's not so much time to stop but it's worth and necessary. I'll sit on a bench for a while and soak into the low winter sunlight.

In wait ...

These are frantic days. A lot of work to be carried on before the year ends. Leftover to be put in place and scored as "done". Introspective thinking to this year results. Short term plans, long term plans. Christmas gifts to look around, strategic decisions to be taken about where to spend the following days, when to move across the land, what to be done before getting back to work. And yet, there's a long term trust that moves us on. A never ending wait for something we're not sure what it is and how will it ever come up. Feels like we're always in wait.

Shadow Days

One of the most exciting and interesting exhibitions ever organized by 591 Photography Blog is now on display. Treat yourself with a tour into the gallery, click on the exhibition poster.

Cross at your own risk

What remains of the glorious days

What remains of the glorious days

What remains of the glorious days

Some pics from the open fields, some time before the gloomy days and snowfalls of the winter season.

Enter at you own risk

Free entrance: satisfaction not granted.

Les Alpes de Doisneau

I've had the chance to visit, for the first time in my life, the town of Grenoble, in the center of the French Silicon Valley (I guess here people in Sophia Antipolis, Nice, might disagree) and afoot of the Alps at the border with Italy. It's been a bad weather outside, no chances to roam around for taking pictures. I can say I've been lucky: I realized that my pocket camera is not working properly anymore: it complains all the time that batteries are low and switches itself off. Christmas is close, I have to write a letter to Santa. I don't know if he would ever read it: I just treated myself with a splendid toy, a tablet.

I arrived in Lyon with a blanket of snow covering the whole region, then we had heavy rains and this evening, after a short pause, snow has started falling down again. I fear for tomorrow morning, when I'll have to take my flight back to Milan. Yet, it's not a weather report I was wishing to write about.

Walking around the narrow streets of the downtown, I came across a museum and saw a poster advertising an exhibition of photograph from the famous photographer Robert Doisneau, one of the inventors of photojournalism, and I made my way in: to my surprise, for free!

I'm not saying that the exhibition is worth a travel to Grenoble but, if you had the chance to pass from here till next April 13th, don't miss a short stop at the Musée.