These are pictures from 3 weeks of my summer in 2011, I actually already have written a lot of notes on. I could turn actually turn it into a huge travel report.

The reason I wont do this, this time is that I feel I wouldn’t be able to develop and present it as I would like to turn out to be. When we visited Latvia I worked a lot asides visiting so many beautiful places. The feeling of not completing my writing on this time of travel isn’t bad though I’m more happy that a few people will be able to let the pictures tell the story.

Thanks to my wonderful girlfriend Ieva for showing me everyything we saw and putting up with me, constantly stopping to take pictures

The flight

Jani

Liepaja – living

Liepaja – graveyard

badass Mikkel

the beach

riga open air museum

wired up

Long Island Icetea

up there

Dzels Vilks





worlds apart

lock n’ love

pidgeon!

art museum

backyard

window

river

milda

custom balcony

the road

the fallen

sunlight

So, yesterday night I had some drinks with friends and on the way down to the city I saw that the gas station in front of my house was being refueled. So, I had to ask the driver if I could take a picture. He seemed to be close to retirement age and when I walked up to him (alone), his first question was:

“What do you want to take it for?”

I responded, that I didn’t want to use it for some kind of abusive manual and that it’s just something you don’t see every day. I though skipped out on the fact, that I thought it looked very nice also because of the snow, his luminescent clothes and the night time.

He agreed and kept on working, I think I didn’t bother him a lot and quickly moved on after three shots.

Furthermore I’ve also discovered photography as a tool for giving away very very personal things. I’ve been taking some self portraits recently and I don’t know if I ever want to show them to anybody else, than the person they were made for.

Actually this is one of the special parts about these pictures, they are not made for building my portfolio or for a paid job, even though I am a little proud of some of them.

To make the self portrait part a little easier, I today bought a Canon RC-6 for remote triggering my camera:

So the bottom line is, that I feel that I am developing in the matters of photography. I am more daring to ask or just shoot people and try to make them comfortable with it. Also to make photography a more personal thing, I still want to try everything and improve my skills as wide and as deep as possible, but I will try to keep it on a more consistent path, when I find some parts that I enjoy more than others.

Yeah, it was on fire, on the third floor of the building, where I live.

The fire didn’t hurt anybody as far as I know, but some of the flats are not safe for inhabiting them. My place is fine and I’m cleaning out the smoke and I have to do a lot of laundry.

I’m alright and managed to grab external HDD, computer and camera, so here are the pictures

emergency exit sign

I had a very funny little conversation yesterday evening and it went something like this:
Ieva:

Let’s go to Australia, like… tomorrow! I want to live like this!

(Thereby meaning being free to travel spontainiously)

Me:

Yes, me too! Why do you think I picked a job where I can work anywhere? I could work, sitting on a fucking kangaroo!

(Thereby not insulting the bouncy little fellas)

What I want to say with this is, that I am very happy about, that my profession is rarely requiring physical presence. Photography does, but the main part of my daily life, coding, does not. This is great and I have worked on coding projects in plains, trains, cars and several flats, houses, bars and on boats

My optimal working conditions are almost everywhere I can bring headphones and can gain internet access, the bigger the bandwidth the better, but 3G or EDGE has also served well already.

Bottom line: Since I can work a lot of places on this planet, I would like to do that more. Keep travelling, visit cities and countries and still be reachable for my clients.

So for this post, I’m just stealing a couple of pictures from Mikkels instagram stream and tell you what my new years eve was like.

Mikkel was making a lot of food

Like this caviar, rucola salad, shrimps and oisters

or this deer with potatoes and mushroom sauce

not to forget the caramel cone with vanilla daim and marshmellow cholocate icecream.
Afterwards we had Latvia’s national champaign, irish whiskey and cigars.

The pictures are all instagrammed by Mikkel, the chef himself. He has done an amazing job and we all suited up for this occasion.

Thanks to Mikkel, Adina and Ieva for a very nice evening