Things have been quiet around here for a while. I was away in Colombia and wasn’t much in the mood for blogging or indeed any kind of connectivity. As was well stated outside a vividly decorated bar in Cartagena, “no tenemos WI-FI, hablen entre ustedes”.

one out of many good reasons to go to Colombia

Colombia is just plain fantastic. Incredible landscapes, huge variety in climate, friendly, helpful and fun people. It’s also huge, and 3 weeks barely scratches the surface. The main purpose of the trip was travel, vacation and relaxation, but I did nevertheless manage to find time to take 1,649 photos (and 3 videos), some of which will doubtless emerge in various channels in the coming weeks and months.

Film’s not dead in Colombia

Hasta mas tardes…

About 3km from where I live in Switzerland is the town of Ponte Tresa, named after the bridge over the river Tresa, which drains Lake Lugano into Lake Maggiore, and marks the border with Italy. Ponte Tresa is actually two separate towns sharing the same name, with a Swiss side and an Italian side.

The bridge over the Tresa. Italy starts at the signpost.  Note the contrast between the spotless, perfectly maintained railing on the Swiss part and the rather more, er “relaxed” look on the Italian side…

Both sides, it is not unfair to say, are rather run-down. Old photographs show a much more prosperous past. Lifting of most border controls, and the shifting patterns of commerce have drastically lessened their status as frontier towns, with just a few fly-blown import agencies as reminders of past glories. But even so, the two sides are remarkably different. The Swiss town keeps up appearances, but seems lifeless. Even the banks are closing. But of course it is clinically clean, quiet and tidy, and the surrounding holiday homes and lavish apartments on the hillsides above and by the lake lend a solid air of Swiss prosperity. The Italian town, on the other hand, is scruffy, chaotic, noisy and vibrant. Even the dingiest bar serves great coffee at crazy low prices, the shops are open in the evening (gasp) and even on Sundays (even bigger gasp) - although the smaller ones take a healthy afternoon siesta. On Saturdays it’s great to just wander over the bridge for a jolt of culture shock and soak up the atmosphere. At weekends in the warmer months there are floods of German, Dutch and Swiss-German tourists, all eager to go bargaining in the wonderfully, ahem, authentic Italian market, where they’re sure to be fleeced by traders from authentic Italian locations such as Pristina, Poznan or Bucharest… or maybe on the odd occasion Palermo. But it’s all good fun.

Ponte Tresa feels like monochrome photography. So here are a few scenes from around town.  These are all taken with the Sigma 60mm DN lens, and converted in Nik SilverEFX.

Of course I don’t want to knock my adopted country, and there are some quite obvious economic reasons why commerce is dead on one side of the border and thriving on the other (and then again, why there are beggars on the street on one side and not on the other) - but even so, the difference in atmosphere is quite remarkable, given that both sides, in theory at least, share a common Lombardy culture and the same language.

Looking through Tiina Itkonen‘s Greenland images I can’t help remembering my one and only visit to Greenland, some 14 years ago. I spent 3 weeks in August 1999 with a small group trekking west and north of Tasiilaq. I had various motives for this trip, one being to be able to get away from daily routine and decide if I wanted to make a big change in my life, another was to try to recapture the memories I had of the Antarctic Peninsula, still another was to purge the memory of a fairly disastrous trip to Venezuela. Oh, and of course to visit Greenland.

On most counts it was a success. I enjoyed the environment, the company, and the welcome we got from the local people. I even enjoyed eating whale meat (seal, not so much). But on a photography level it was a total disaster. Something went badly wrong with my Canon A1, either the exposure meter was defective, or it mis-read in low temperature, or I just screwed up. In any case, most photos were badly over-exposed. And worse, at one of the absolute high points, a trip out into a fjord in a small open boat with an Inuit guide tracking a humpback whale, my Tamron zoom lens fell apart and I was left with a 35mm lens. As far as I recall I just gave and enjoyed the show. But I took a few shots.

I dug out the photos again yesterday, and actually in the age of Instagram they’ve got a certain something about them. Well some of them, at least. In fact there’s a hint of “honour thy mistake as a hidden intention” in some, in retrospect.

Greenland is unfinished business to me. It will probably remain so. Going back seems increasingly unlikely.

I guess the answer to the question “does the world need another photograph of Venice ?” is pretty obviously a resounding NO. Like the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon, or indeed Iceland’s Jokulsarlon, Venice has been photographed to oblivion and back. And yet while I feel absolutely no desire to add to my archive of Jokulsarlon shots, I could happily traipse around Venice - with or without a camera - every weekend.

Venice, of course, was one of first tour destinations offered by Thomas Cook in the mid 19th century, and has been a magnet for travellers of all descriptions for centuries. Venice long ago sold her soul to the tourist trade, but then again, trade is at the very core of Venice. And yet although seemingly every inch of the city has been described and photographed countless times, every trip there seems to be like a new discovery. The causeway which takes you from Mestre to Venice bridges more than the lagoon. It takes you from one version of reality to another. The mainland seen from Venice appears like a distant mirage, a fragmented memory of some other, irrelevant place. The train station, or the Piazza di Roma, are like decompression tanks where part of these suddenly foreign lands are allowed to crossover with Venice, and which allow a space for the mind to adapt to the disorientation brought about by the shifting planes of reference.

Venice for many is part of a “See Europe in 5 days” package. Tick off St Mark’s, blow €50 on a gondola, and you’re done. I have to confess I did, finally, visit St Mark’s last December, since there was nobody around and no queues.  I even dithered about visiting the Doges palace, because you have to, really, but on the point of buying a ticket (also no queues, obviously: I don’t do queues), I realised that I’d be losing several hours of quality wandering-around-the-city-getting-lost time, and beat a hurried retreat.

Because that’s what Venice is about for me. Exploring labyrinths within labyrinths, with new details and new mysteries being revealed every time, but never really repeating. Fascinating hideaways which I don’t know how I found, and I’ll never find again. My favourite parts of Venice are, unsurprisingly, away from the focal points. I can never avoid the further reaches of the Castello, but even the less ancient parts of Cannaregio draw me in. The list goes on. And at night, it all changes.

In literature, Venice is often associated with ghost stories, like Girardi’s “Vaporetto 13”, or with gritty, dastardly crime, or scary tales like McEwan’s “Comfort of Strangers”. Or on the photographic side, Marsden’s “City of Haunting Dreams”. Sort of entertaining, but I don’t really get that, myself. For me, there’s the tangible sense of layers upon layers of living history, and most of all the essential craziness of the whole concept of this fabulous, ridiculous city, the “Pure City” so well chronicled by Peter Ackroyd. And there’s comfort in Venice’s confined yet endless spaces, and just a feeling of pure joy which it can communicate. And it’s an island. I’m a total sucker for islands.

So, no, the world does not need another photograph of Venice. But I do, and if you don’t, you might be well advised to steer clear of this blog for the next few weeks…

Well after 8 days in Iceland I have maintained my perfect record of Aurora Borealis dodging. It has rained, snowed, and in between there has even been the odd patch of light illuminating iconic photo opportunities to which we have been delivered by our tireless guide, Daníel Bergmann. This has been my second ever group photo tour. I don’t usually find that I can really photograph in a group, especially with people I don’t know, but this time Marissa, Leslie, Ed, Patrick, Shane and Peter have made it a real pleasure.

I don’t know yet if I got any good photos, but my first experience with the Olympus E-5 has been pretty positive. There are a few things that I think the E-3 does better, but that might just be down to familiarity.

Hvitserkur, straight out of camera, with a nice big raindrop waiting to be edited out

We have a few more hours of potential photographing around the Reykjanes peninsula, but anyway, I think there already a few shots in the tin.