Dreaming of Spring Break, whenever that may be. Catching my subjects and my pictures whenever and wherever I can has become a more permanent style of shooting for me, lately. It looks as if the weekdays follow each other relentlessly, omitting the weekends altogether. It would be a bit exaggerated to say that I don’t remember the last real weekend I had for shooting, but that one is already in a past, close to the closet of memories.

Lightroom is a fantastic tool to remember, the catalog is always there, even if your pictures are off-line. The thumbnails show you what has been, and sometimes that makes me think I want to do this or that all over again. That usually never happens.

Read more: Spring break, without break

Every year around this time we do the same thing. We whine when it gets cold again and we rejoice when it gets warmer. What we usually forget is that this happens every year, more or less around the same time. This year is early with warmer weather. Warmer weather also brings newcomers to Manitoba.

Manitoba is a special place in North America in the fact that it is central. Most of the migratory birds come through here, then move on to either north, east or west.

Read more: Welcome to the newcomers!

Your own home is often seen as the ideal working place. Let me tell you one thing: it certainly is the most pleasant place to work in, but you need to be very vigilant about working hours and time off. For a long time I have now been working on a huge project, private for a company I work with. The project is now finished and delivered, all I have to do is deal with the unavoidable typos and bugs.

What does that have to do with photography? Well, being “on call” for fixing bugs and other annoyances results in no real time off. Lunch breaks become working hours as colleagues will more often than not call you during that time as not to interfere with their usual activities. As a result, your lunch break becomes a time of higher stress than the rest of the day. After a while you feel your energy dripping away, never to be recovered.

Read more: Lunch break

Weekends seem to be in short supply lately. Back in the days I remember that we had weekends that lasted two full days, sometimes even with a Friday afternoon. Nowadays, weekends seem to be reduced to a simple Saturday morning. The rest of the time being occupied by unmovable plans and projects. Now, it’s easy to whine and mourn those long-gone times of weekends that deserved the name of “weekend”, it won’t help bringing them back.

The past winter I have had lots of those mini-weekends. Most of them were used to hunt and shoot wildlife. Sometimes the wildlife was easy to get, sometimes not so. Let’s go and have a look what those short weekends have yielded in terms of wildlife harvest, shall we?

Read more: Winter Saturday mornings

A blog post needs to have a storyline. A blog post needs to have a storyline! This is what I was taught in school. Not so much about a blog but more about dissertations. It still rings true. Writing about anything without a storyline presents the danger of boring your audience. I can still hear my teacher in Dutch language hammering that into our heads.

Nowadays I write in English, Dutch seems to be far away. However, my teacher is still right about one thing. A dissertation or even a blog post should have a storyline.

Read more: About writing

Much like an Indian Summer when summer is already over, Strawberry Spring is a false spring. Last week has seen nicely elevated temperatures, high enough to melt away almost all of the snow and ice of the winter. At the climax of this Strawberry Spring was a night filled with fog.

That’s something that simply has to be shot, in any way possible. Night and fog have always been a favourite of mine. So let’s step out for a minute or two, Something is going to happen…

Read more: Strawberry Spring

Winter is gone. The snow has started to melt, the puddles and potholes are back to haunt our footwear and our cars. With the start of spring also comes more daylight time, whether we saved it or not, it will be here.

This is the time to remember what we shot during those dark days of the year. As usual I find that many of my winter shots have been night or dusk shots. Forget about the dawn shots, ok?

Read more: Shots in the dark