White

All together now!

Veni, vidi, picti and ... misi.

(I came, I saw, I pictured and ... posted)

How many words could we spend of the modern way of living and sharing our lives?

I giorni della merla

These should have been the traditionally and (till some time ago) statistically coldest days of the year. "I giorni della merla" (the blackbird lady's days) are somehow celebrated and long waited, at least in the northern regions of Italy. A time to stay put at home, cozy and warm.
I don't know about similar traditions and sayings here in Austria. The weather has recently taken a break, forgetting traditions to respect and stats to maintain: it will give us some more chilling days, for sure, but not soon ... later on.

Back on Top

(Made and processed with my mobile)

Survivors - I

I'm looking into the "photographic" material that I produced last summer in Croatia, wishing to find few pictures good enough for publishing. The folder counts more or less nine hundreds pictures: which is about thirty rolls of the old film cameras, two rolls per day. An impressive rate, I'd say. Lots of doubles, or triplets with different settings or exposition. I would have run into trouble if I hadn't had a wireless connection through which storing them on my piece of cloud. I wonder how many pictures I would have taken if I had to pay fro the rolls, the film development and the prints. Four?

Now, looking at the crop, I'm not able to declare myself disappointed: I decided deliberately to leave my reflex at home and spend those two weeks with only my mobile at reach. I thought it would and been easier to me to move around an unexplored land and express myself in a place with plenty of unknown opportunities. And I also thought it wouldn't have been worst than my last point-and-shoot. Still, after sitting at the post-processing tool, the result is very bad, unmanageable, sometimes unrecoverable and I can't blame anyone else but me. These pictures are good for a mobile, for Instagram look-like-and-go-by approach, not for memory.

Donji Humac (Croatia)

(Made with my mobile)

Another Summer is gone

(Made and sent from my mobile)

What else?

When all the desirable elements are in the right place, in the right moment, with the right light ... and you don't have any other gears with you than your mobile.

Some planets left

According to recent cosmic observations, there seems to be many more bodies like Earth than we actually thought, out there.

(Made and sent from my mobile)

MicroLandscapes

This text is a post-publication add-on. As I explained my friend Marco, in these days I can't do any better. Time is very short: mostly absorbed by work, the rest by my family. In such conditions even a weird eggs-box can be a source of inspiration. And it's nice to see how my mobile doesn't fail with macros.

(Made and sent from my mobile)

Peppone e Don Camillo

When I (or as I'd better say "we") opted for the biggest change made in our lives, I was pretty sure that my personal work-family balance would have benefit, thanks to more than one reason. Commuting to work in Milan took me circa two hours and a half per day, whereas here I don't spend more than half an hour. When I was lucky, on the Italian means of transport I could read, entertain myself talking with someone of my circle or even sleep. In the bad days, instead, I could only hang my arm on a handrail and try to keep myself upright, while pressed among hundreds of other passengers. In Graz, thanks to the location I found for our apartment, I put my buttocks on the car and drive for eight kilometers until I'm under the window of my office.

Alas, what I hadn't calculated is that the chip-makers life is a bit tougher than the chip-consumer's. Now I'm working for those who used to be my former components providers. Before I just had to pick a component from a virtual shelf and use it, now we have to run like hell in order to give our customers the best in class products and keep the competition much behind. I'm not saying that the telecom system developer's life is much more relaxed: it's just that there are different kind of challenges, a wider and smoother distribution of responsibilities and consequently a lighter felling of urge.

I don't complain about this last point. I've spent my last ten years complaining and listening complaints about useless managers and those who could easily hide themselves in the shadows of our organization and live on others' shoulders. On this other side of the world it seems there's no shadow, no twilight. You can't hide, neither you can take long breaks and breathe. No alternation of rest and diet seasons, in other words you have to be always fit and ready to perform. Which is good, thrilling and in most of the cases exciting.

The only drawback is that those two hours that I wished to have on my side, now that we're approaching the delivery time, just before Christmas, are being consumed "walking the extra-mile". As a result, in the last months I haven't been able to do all the sport activity and photo shooting that I was wishing. I started using massively my mobile phone to capture, edit and send pictures from the most inconvenient and uncomfortable places, photographically speaking, like bus stops, parking lots, rest areas on the highway or from the cozy seat of a tram, while taking my daughter to school.

In these conditions quality is no longer a reasonable target. It helps to improve your pictures, for sure but it doesn't help at all at looking at the world. I have to be happy of the immediacy that technology provides and keep my sense of "hunting" always fit, for better times.

🔻

So, this morning while walking quickly by this long and narrow square behind the central Franziskaner abbey, my eyes fell on the name of two restaurants, presumably lead by Italians, facing on both ends of it and I couldn't wait for better times and better light conditions before taking a picture. Chances are that I would never find the time again.

For those who have never heard about Don Camillo e Peppone, here are a couple of helpful Wiki-pages about Don Camillo and his author Giovannino Guareschi.

(Made and sent from my mobile)

A view from the tram

(Made and sent from my mobile)

Different perspectives

Some prefer to look at the tips of their feet while others are always shooting at the stars.

(Made and sent from my mobile)

Late Crop

There's not only pumpkin seeds oil, then, around here. Winter is approaching quickly but still the meadows close to the city are ripe with goods to harvest.

(Made and sent from my mobile)

We are shadows

Milano, Garibaldi underground station.

It's surprising how a badly made shot can turn into an evocative picture.

(Made and sent from my mobile.)

Black Coffee with Milk

(Made and sent from my mobile.)

Swedish Interiors

I can't remember by heart how many pictures I've taken in nearly eighteen years of digital photography. An simple inquiry on my storage devices could return scaring numbers. I stopped counting them a long time ago. As a matter of fact, for years, during my travels in Northern Europe I used to shoot everything I saw and store them in the HD as soon as I was back home, in wait for better times.

Those better times never arrived. Nevertheless, from time to time it happens to dig into the folders for some other reasons and stop on shoots that I forgot about. Simple pictures, some times taken in prohibitive conditions and apparently meaningless to anyone else but me.

So, this afternoon I fell into a folder where the following two pictures had been thrown. They were taken with an old mobile telephone of mine. The original images are really poor but the process I applied to convert them to B&W made things better, turning them into something good enough for publishing.

They were taken in Mölndal, in the old Ericsson premises were the product unit I belonged to was based. At that time a total restructuring operation had just been announced and several offices had been left empty, or almost.

Empty spaces have always been my favorites for long discussions on the phone or for short leg-stretching walks during a coffee break. In one of those rooms, right on the windowsill I spotted some decoration items, left as if the room had just been abandoned under a fire alarm. Items brought in office to make it look like warmer, as our own apartments and then surprisingly forgotten, abandoned.

(A Swedish Window)

The glass bowl on a typical Swedish styled piece of furniture, that I wondered if it ever had been used for any purpose, was another example. Laying on a parquet floor full of screws rolling around and each of my steps was worth of a modern art installation, that I couldn't disregard.

(A Swedish Meeting Table)

In Open Fields

A snapshot taken with a mobile is not able to convey all you feel in some situations. This is an example. Last Sunday, early in the morning, in the open field just out of the town.

(Made and sent from my mobile.)

The way up

The arrival of the winter seasons also means the opening of the indoor tournaments season and I, as a father of a young and sporting volley player, cannot refuse touring around the province of Varese and visiting new villages on almost every Sunday afternoon.
Between two matches, there's always time for a short walk to the local bar, where to sip a cup of - in better times - undrinkable coffee, under the glances of few elderly locals gathered to play cards while listening at the football matches commentary from the always on television in the next room.
Beside the bar on the main street, few of these villages have little more than a small church to be noted and tentatively visited. In the accidental visitor's support, the winter frock helps making them a little bit more interesting. People stay inside their homes or in the bar lounge and walking through the desert streets, where the sounds are dump and the kitchens flavors fall down from the chimneys melted with fog, is always pleasant. It feels like walking alone on a mountain track. And, sometimes, you even find sources of inspiration. Metaphors and epiphanies. Just like the narrow climb below.

I'm going to walk a tortuous path. Next months are going to bring a wealth of new experiences and events in my basket, as well as in those of my family.

(Made and sent from my mobile.)

Don't Stop

Fort Campomolon

What remains of Forte Campomolon, a WW1 Italian fort facing the former Austrian border, is just a round-about gallery dug into the mountain sandstone to help the heavy artillery climb up to the fort roof. The top of the mount has been now conquered by tall trellises carrying arrays oh huge drum-like antennas for long haul radio hops. Rubble and debris are spread everywhere. A stone hung on a wall celebrates an Italian officer who sacrificed his and others lives to defend this forgotten corner of the World.

Luckily, the strong winds blowing from the bottom of the valley conceal the hiss of the telecom cabinets cooling system. I can only hear my breath echoing in the emptiness of this circular gallery.

(Made and sent from my mobile.)