Here in my village it is midday and I am just arriving home after walking about four kilometres (only taking into account the outward journey) in the direction of the south of the village. Towards there are many of the farmlands and farms close to the village. There are also the paved and dirt roads with their typical rural and bucolic charm...
I left my house at about 7:30 AM after noticing that everyone around me was "intent on living a normal life" and then I felt a bit out of place. So I took my camera, attached my 55-300mm zoom and went to the street ready to walk a lot and to take "any kind of pictures" (hence my decision to take a more or less "all-terrain" zoom)...
When I was already on the streets walking, I realised that I didn't feel like taking street photos today either. The people on the streets also seemed to be putting their efforts into "going about their normal lives" and the sight of a guy walking down the streets in shorts and tennis shoes while holding a camera and talking to dogs, cats and birds is not perhaps what people "going about their normal lives" want to see at 7:30 AM... So I opted to head for the countryside and started walking in southerly direction...
And having done this, I discovered my decision was a wise one. The nearby fields were as always "full of pictures to be taken"!... There were also people "going about their normal lives" ;) but in much smaller numbers and also doing this in a very relaxed and slow way (typical of these rural corners) so I just went for a long walk and took pictures of every interesting thing I saw. The most beautiful thing about today's morning in the countryside was that there were large masses of fog in the valley, which interspersed with totally clear spaces. So my walk became a back and forth of light and shadow. It was like taking photographs in two or more places at the same time and having them alternate unpredictably.
As I move further away from the centre of town, lovely things start to happen. The vegetation here is a bit "crazy" and I can have either a large pasture or a forest in front of me. In some cases the foliage is dense and in others the trees are bare-branched. It is also feasible to see serophilous plants (some cacti) and next to them tropical trees and I even found the "skeleton" of a huge dry conifer appearing very conspicuously on a hill.
I'm looking at these photos and crazy things are going through my head like wondering: How come there are not more people wandering on these roads and taking pictures? Then I remember that I'm kind of an "Exception to the rule" here in my village. This is a place with a local economy badly affected by the economic crises and the migration of a large part of its working age population. So it is natural that most people do their best to get by. I do too, of course. But my priorities are very different from those of most people here. I undertook a kind of "self-transformation" many years ago, and an important part of that practice was learning to live with little and have much more free time than I used to have. So that explains why, the only guy walking around here on a Wednesday morning taking photos, is me.
Despite my early "head-on collision with the reality around me" today I had a beautiful morning of walking and taking pictures. So I can consider myself very lucky. I found everything during my walk: Landscapes, roads, people, animals, villages, mist, fields, blue skies and a whole lot of other exquisite things to photograph... That's something really valuable for me!... (Although I almost died of heat when the fog went away and the radiant sun started to warm my head around 11 AM when I was returning home!)... :))
ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL INFO: Photographs captured with my Nikon D7000 DSLR camera in RAW format, then processed in Adobe Camera RAW for adjustments regarding light, sharpening, contrast and depth... The pictures are then exported to JPG format on which minor modifications such as straightening and adding watermarks were carried out using PhotoScape 3.6.3.
Thank you very much for your visit and appreciation!
"We make photographs to understand what our lives mean to ourselves." - Ralph Hattersley.
Lens: AF-S DX NIKKOR 55-300mm f/4.5-5.6G ED VR
