Slowing down…

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.

Water supply

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.

City of the north

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.

Harlingertrekweg

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,

Snowy, moody morning

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.

Sticky 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.

Ancient stones

Here in the New World we talk about “historical” when an object or a place is some 100 years old. In the Old World, “old” is more like 600 years old or even older. We arrived in North America only some 500 years ago. Buildings were created only in the last 150 years. Anything older has been replaced or destroyed.

Collegiale of Ste Waudru

This time I would like to take you to an old church. Construction began in 1450, a little later than many of the churches we know in Western Europe.

Night time fun

Walking around in a far away city with a camera is always good. Even more if the city is photogenic. However, when you are far far away, you probably don’t have a tripod with you. So you have to resolve to other means of stabilisation. Or not?

Bereghinya

When I came out of a coffee shop ( coffee, nothing else, eh! ), I was greeted with this view of Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kiev. The same spot of the now famous Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004.