Lately I haven’t been taking many pictures. For some reason I can’t get myself to go out in the freezing temperatures and shoot something I have shot already multiple times. The birds are mostly gone to warmer climes, the “dead stuff” is nearly all that remains.

Even the geese have left, only a few birds remain, and I think I know them all by their first names by now. Now if only they’d perform tricks so I could photograph them…

The life we are living is mostly made up out of stress and fast-paced actions. Take a drive through a city and see if your blood pressure didn’t rise above usual. Spend a day in your office and see if at the end of that day you don’t want to trash that telephone or that keyboard.

Slowing down is a modern necessity, while in the old days, life seemed slow enough not to need any change of pace. Going to the city was an outing to be noted. Today we are happy to be able to get away, be it on a camp ground, at the lake or anywhere that does not involve modern amenities.

My home town is a city of the north. The north of The Netherlands, it is not located in Holland. Where I was born, the ground lies 4 meters below average sea level. If the dikes were broken, most of the house would be under water. My home town is more than a thousand years old if you count all the settlements of the past in that same spot.

The city is called Leeuwarden, or Ljouwert in the local Frisian language. I spent most of my childhood and youth in that city; coming back is coming home to the house of your parents when you have become an adult,

A few weeks ago, when I was in The Netherlands, I was told that in winter everybody can take good pictures. Winter is not quite here yet, but it already has a foot in the doorway. Yesterday I decided to go out, the weather looked foggy and gloomy. By the time I arrived at my chosen destination, the fog had made place for an intermittent drizzle, mixed with some snow.

You’d say that those are not the best conditions for photography. But… you already know that you have to take pictures, come rain or shine. Ok, here was neither, but I still needed to take some pictures.