live in Venezuela, and in this country power outages are a frequent occurrence. So yesterday when the power went out at 4:30 PM, I knew that we would have a 4 hours of continuous blackout. So without thinking too much I took my camera, put on a pair of old hiking boots which I have in my closet and headed for the hills north of town with the intention of waiting for the sunset there and take a few pictures...

rought and I are at the height of our annual love affair... This is a complex, tense, difficult relationship... Every year the drought and I play at alternately loving and hating each other... I wander around the town, observing how the greens are disappearing to become yellows, browns and ochres. The air becomes thick, hot, rough and the dust seems to be more than a third of what one breathes... Yet she knows that I love her drama and that unmistakable sense of decay she brings to the valley... The branches of the trees are stripped bare, some even die... On the hills appear rocks, paths and places unnoticeable during the rainy season... The landscape is almost abstract, unpredictable and one feels vulnerable in front of the enchantment of some spaces immersed in this almost macabre beauty... For this and more, the drought and I love and hate each other, coming and going in a Dantesque and sometimes incomprehensible symbiosis, in which she throws me into the heat and talks to me about necessary cycles, and I take pictures of her, reluctantly understanding her... The drought reminds me of that present God of Hinduism called “Shiva”, the one who destroys the illusory and immerses us in a state of consciousness that clears and clarifies what we once believed to be real... I don't know, but there is something between me and the drought that year by year gets deeper... It's not just about photography, no... In every cycle there is a lesson to learn...

e are practically in the middle of March, the morning air is a bit thick perhaps due to the smoke from a forest fire that occurred far from the valley of Montalbán. The temperature, even though it is still early, is relatively high and the thermometer marks about 24°C at 7:00 AM. The streets of the town are silent and in the distance you can hear the sound of birds in the foothills of the mountains. So after drinking a cup of coffee and eating a couple of slices of bread, I take my camera and go for a walk towards those hills which I visit frequently...

eople, animals, things... The streets of the town seem inexhaustible and the thought of it often makes me doubt my sanity. After all, it is a very small town and if I were someone observing myself wandering almost daily through this compressed and daily universe, I would surely ask myself why the rays do it? and eventually, I would also question the mental health of someone like that... However, at the end of the day and from an almost obligatory “daily self-analysis” I conclude: I'm certainly a strange guy, but I keep my mental health intact (at least up to the present moments🤣)... So I won't worry about that and will keep having fun taking pictures in the streets...

need you to get out some of those ugly plastic bins with old stuff out of your closet side”... That's what my wife said after we were having breakfast and chatting happily about the weather, our pets and other nice things... 😕 So that was how my morning was spent moving a couple of those big plastic boxes into the storage room where we keep literally “thousands of old things from generations ago”... However, in the back and forth I decided to open one of those bins and found things in there that brought back a lot of memories... Here are some pictures I took of those things to share with you today on #Hive... 📷

egardless of being born and having always lived in this town (53 years and counting), I can still find roads along which I have never passed before. Some of these photographs are taken on such a path. It is only a little more than a kilometer long, but it connects two main roads that cross the valley in the rural areas north of town, a place I regularly visit for exercise and photography...