While developing and scanning the first 30 rolls of film, I realized that it is better for me to shoot for a long time and dealing with large quantities of images some time later: some time has passed and I am less involved with the act of taking the picture, allowing me a more detached look of my own work. Because of the quantity of the material involved, things start falling into place in a better way, I can have a better overview of the whole portfolio, instead of publishing single images. Ideas have more time to evolve.

It is a big tempation to scratch the itch of instant publishing and instant gratification, but I realized how this made me take several different steps in different directions without following any path for a longer time: excellent for new experiments, but the time has come to stop with experiments and start something serious.
Right now I’d say that I would like to continue writing about things and thoughts and photography, but I’m not sure if I can keep this as well: there are tons of excellent blogs about photography and I don’t want to compete with them.

So, take this as a goodbye for the time being.

When she had 20 years
She turned to her mother
Saying “mother I know that you’ll grieve
But I’ve given my soul
To Saint John the Gambler
Tomorrow comes time to leave”
– Townes van Zandt

[click on picture to enlarge]

The reason for interrupting the blog for such a long time was that I’ve spent the last 6 months traveling. Of course I brought with me thousands of new pictures, all taken on film, and I’m quite scared about the huge work I’ll have to do to develop them.

One strange thing about being back after such a long time, is that I almost don’t recognize the city I live in anymore. Some things are familiar, some other things changed, and some more remained as they were but I simply forgot about them. It is a bit like being a tourist in my own town. Germany has a peculiar color palette, by the way.

I’m busy with 2000 different things, so it will take me a short time before I will start regularly posting photographs again. Looking back at several of the pictures I’ve shot here in the past, I must say that I don’t find them that interesting anymore, but I’ve not even started browsing through my archives.

While away, I thought about several new ideas, luckily I wrote them down somewhere because I forgot them again, I have to check my journals.

What’s become of the baby
In this cold December morning?
– Robert Hunter

[click on picture to enlarge]

My hard drives and negative holders are still full of pictures that will make it on this website, but for now I will stop posting them. I will resume transmissions in June 2009.

Only this month more than 900 different people visited this website, consuming a bandwidth of more than 330MB. Before starting the blog, there were merely less than 200 people every month who were visiting my online portfolio, so I can clearly think that starting this new webpage was a good idea and it is the reason that will keep me posting stuff later on.

At the same time I will also start some new projects that will find their place here: merely organizing pictures in series and make an edit of the best of them, and try to develop further a few ideas I had while writing this blog, for which I didn’t find any time.

Thanks a lot to all the people who linked to this blog, especially Peter of Sonic Blog.