Between the waters

Venezuela (Dec 11, 2004)

I am not sure the title is grammatically correct. But that’s what it is, a photo taken while flying between water vapor clouds, above the large bucket of liquid water that is the Caribbean sea. The most important substance on Earth in two of its fundamental states. For the third state, the solid one, is enough to visit the larger pool of water that is the Atlantic ocean around here in Boston, in winter, when there is plenty of that too. But that’s beside the point, and out-of-season right now.

I shot this image last December while flying from Caracas to an archipelago of small islands called Los Roques (I have already posted several photos of the place on this blog). It is a one hour flight, with small planes that fly at the clouds level, not too high on the sea surface. You want to take one of the earliest flight in the morning, to be at Los Roques as early as possible and spend your time at the beach, or Scuba diving in its coral reef. The downside is that it is very difficult for me to wake up early in the morning (physical suffering describes accurately what happen to me in such cases), but one is usually rewarded by vistas like this one, in which the golden light of the young sun is filtered by the water above and reflected by the water below, enshrouding your little plane and yourself in a warm glow that heals your spirit and dissipates the longing for the missed sleep hours. You just want to dissolve in this light and become a molecule of water, drifting in the wind between the sea and the sky.

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As you may have already noticed, Matt has come out with a new issue of Photoblogs Magazine. I am still only halfway reading it, but I am impressed again by the quality of the stories, and of the posted photographs. When the previous issue was announced on Photoblogs.org, I remember reading a couple of comments asking why was necessary yet another magazine republishing photoblogs photo. If you read the stories published in this and the previous two issues, you’ll see why. The magazine is clearly a work of love by Matt and the people involved, and it is not a “vanity reprint” of random photoblogs. Each story expands on the personal journey of the featured photographers, in a format that is complementary to the daily postings of a photoblogs. Blogs, and their graphically augmented version we call photoblogs, tend to present individual moments evolving in time: snapshots of our life threaded by single thoughts written at the time of the post. The stories on Photoblogs magazine give to the photographers writing them the opportunity of stepping out of their own time, and explore the larger picture behind their own daily posts. To see the mosaic appearing from the ensamble of the individual tiles. This is why I think Photoblogs Magazine is a wonderful contribution to our community, because it opens the window on a dimension lost in the fragmented rhythm of the internet age. It makes us (readers and contributors) to stop, and to think. What are you waiting? Stop reading this yapping, go to the Photoblogs Magazine and submit something for the next issue!