It’s always difficult to say goodbye and leave something behind, be it places, habits, jobs or people, especially people (or is it especially habits?) But when you leave all of them behind by moving to another country, it feels like a life ends and another life begins. I did this three times already and I am wondering how many new “lives” we get before the game is over. It reminds me of what one of my favorite Romanian writers (Dan Lungu) said “We have only one life, but many deaths.”

So, after three years and three months of living in Brussels it’s time to say goodbye to: French courses, slow Sunday mornings with pain au chocolat and Tribune de Bruxelles (accompanied in the first two years by a hefty French-Romanian dictionary), strolling in the Cinquantenaire park, complaining about the weather and the bureaucracy, cheap weekend trips in Europe, job, biking in the forest at Woluve, La Cambre and Tervuren, feeling a stranger, language and cultural barriers, feeling alone, consumerism at its peak, Leffe, Palm, Chimay Bleu, Westmalle Triple, Jupiler, the feeling that I made a difference in some people’s lives, changing, Carolle, new and old friends, isolation, self-discovery, love, good conversations, Uca, feeling lost, heartbreak, Carolle, courage, kundalini yoga, hiking and kayaking in the Ardennes, Couleur Cafe, new projects, unfinished projects, fantastic second hand shops, Jeu de Balle (the flea market), the pita with melting fta cheese, olives and dried tomatoes at Marche du Midi (still drooling), rekindling my passion for photography, discipline, decisions…(to be continued)

As for the photos, they were taken from the top of Parking 58, a 10-floor parking building in the center of Brussels, where I’ve been wanting to go ever since I arrived in Brussels. So on my last day here I wanted to check off that ever-growing list of places to see at least this one (and there are still so many things I would like to photograph in Brussels). I thought it was also a good way to say goodbye to Brussels through photos.

I would like to hear from you too. Have you lived in different countries? How would you describe it? How did it change you? How was it to say goodbye to a place? Does your perception of it change when you know you would leave?

More black and white photos here

Filed under: Belgium, Black and white, Fine art photography, Urban landscapes Tagged: Brussels, Photography ]]> http://claudephotography.wordpress.com/2011/12/04/foggy-night-in-brussels/feed/ 1 claudetm Foggy night Foggy night Foggy night _MG_7365_web http://claudephotography.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/autumn/ http://claudephotography.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/autumn/#comments Thu, 01 Dec 2011 21:25:10 +0000 Claudia Tanasescu Photography http://claudephotography.wordpress.com/?p=2428 ]]>

More autumn photos here.

As for pottery, it is such a relaxing activity! It’s wonderful play with the clay, let your hands and mind free to create. The results can be surprising. Although for all of us it was the first time we’ve ever tried it, some people really found a hidden talent and produced some (small) masterpieces.

More photos from the pottery class here.

Atelier Nikisan

Follow your dreams

It all started with this blog. It was just a small step, but often this is all it takes. Soon I found myself taking more and more steps on this new, unexpected road, which seemed like being built with each step I took. I bought a DSLR camera, I enrolled in a photography course, I learned more about blogging, I changed the look of my blog, I began writing more, I took a Photoshop course, I bought one more lens, I read books and blogs about photography and learned (and I am still learning) with growing enthusiasm, all this while working a full time job and doing other activities: learning French (because I’m living in Belgium), traveling, doing yoga and all the rest you have to do for a living. (You might want to read this other post I wrote about finding your passion or your true calling). Now I find myself musing – half scared, half confident – with the idea of doing this for a living.

Go against the current

It all started with a small step in a new direction. But this road is not always easy. There are moments when I feel I will never be good enough or that I should just drop it and stick to a safe job that pays the bills. In moments like this, it is so important to find support and recover the inner strength to keep going. I am lucky to have good friends who support me. I am also inspired and motivated by other people’s stories. I see that many people who are doing creative work are going through the same process. Lately I’ve been reading some articles and a book that inspired and motivated me, which I would like to share with you:

Keep on looking

- an interview with Mary Jo Bang, On Learning, Self-Discipline and Taking the Road Less Traveled from which I quote:
“If that desire is strong enough, and persistent enough, you do whatever you have to do to teach yourself how to cross over from being a reader to being a reader who is a writer. [...] The same was true of photography. It took me a long time to make the photographs I saw in my mind. [...] Over time, what was on the film and the photographic paper more and more resembled what I’d imagined when I looked into the viewfinder. And I saw how, if you steadily worked at something, what you don’t know gradually erodes and what you do know slowly grows and at some point you’ve gained a degree of mastery. What you know becomes what you are. You know photography and you are a photographer. You know writing and you are a writer.”

- a speech by Ira Glass on the importance of doing a lot of work when you want to be good at something (a writer in his case):

“…it’s like there’s a gap. That for the first years you are making stuff, what you are making isn’t so good. It’s not that great, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. And your taste is good enough, that you can tell that what you are making, is kind of disappointment to you, you know what I mean? A lot of people never get past that phase and a lot of people at that point they quit. [...] the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you are going to finish one story. Because it’s only actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you are making will be as good as your ambitions.“

Find inspiration

- an article on how to deal with mistakes, by Brooke Snow, a photographer whose style and photography tips and honesty I really like: How being easier on ourselves has more rewards than we allow ourselves to know

- a post about Being a Beginner. by Gwen Bell, whose tough and authentic questions always make me think about what I really want and answer honestly (it’s more difficult than it sounds!):

“What can you quit right now? What scares you to learn? Can you start today?”

- The Artist’s Way : A Course in Discovering and Recovering your Creative Self by Julia Cameron, which points out the obstacles we are facing on the way of becoming an artist; many times these obstacles are created by ourselves, because it can be very scary to actually go for it and follow your dreams:

“But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano/act/paint/write a decent play?” Yes… the same age you will be if you don’t.

- Allowing dreams by Susannah Conway, whose heartfelt online course Unravelling I have just followed.

“But today I realised that i’ve reached a place where i’ve let go of some expectations – of what my life should be looking like by now, of what i am capable of doing, of who i could be. I’m starting to embrace what is, and that includes giving my dreams more space to breathe.”

More inspiring quotes on my other blog.

For the love of photography: spending hours trying to capture the free falling of a leaf

Biking in my favorite park in Brussels, to enjoy the last days probably of this sunny autumn proved to be a good opportunity to try the photographic technique called panning with some very unpredictable flying subjects. All it takes is a lot of patience, attention…and a bit of luck to capture the birds in flight.

For the ones interested in the technical details of this panning experiment:
- the first photo: aperture: f/6,7; shutter speed: 1/45 seconds; ISO 200; For this photo I used the shutter priority mode, but then I changed to manual mode, because there were many exposure failures.
- the second photo: aperture: f/5,6; shutter speed: 1/60 seconds; ISO 200.
- the third photo: aperture: f/8; shutter speed: 1/30 seconds; ISO 200. As you can see, the background motion blur is stronger than in the other photos due to longer exposure time, but the subject is less clear. The shutter speed was too slow or maybe my sync with the bird’s flight was not perfect.

Important: the focus mode was set on continuous focusing (AI Servo in my Canon 450D’s menu). The lens I used was the Canon 18-200 mm, f: 3,5-5,6.

…and poetry by Jim Morrison on the classical song “Adagio” by Albinioni:

Do you know how pale and wanton thrillful
comes death on a stranger hour
unannounced, unplanned for
like a scaring over-friendly guest you’ve
brought to bed.
Death makes angels of us all
and gives us wings
where we had shoulders
smooth as raven’s
claws…

So I decided to give it one more chance and this Sunday I took a trip to Oostende, on the Belgian coast of the North Sea. It was the end of October and the weather was not exactly inviting. The sky was heavy with low, grey clouds, a fine drizzle was falling, making the air cold and wet, so that no jacket seemed warm enough. In spite of that, the train from Brussels to Oostende was packed and the seaside was full of people, as if it were a summer day. I think this is one of the valuable lessons I learned while living in Belgium: to ignore bad weather and to really cherish each sunny day. When I say to people I live in Belgium, their first reaction is, making a compassionate-sorry face: ‘It rains a lot, isn’t it?”. Indeed, the weather is quite bad here. Especially the summers are cold and rainy and the lack of light is the worst. In August everybody designs escape strategies, in order to make a stack of sun, heat and light, which has to last until the next escape. But as I said, here you don’t plan your life according to the weather, otherwise you would end up staying at home all the time. I believe people here learn since they were toddlers, carried by their parents on the back of the bike, through rain and wind, that bad weather is no excuse.

On that rainy October day in Oostende there were couples strolling on the beach, playing with a dog or flying kites, families on four-seat tandem bicycles, children building castles in the sand, elegantly-clad white-haired ladies, with an air from 1900, sitting in wheelchairs, pushed by equally distinguished old gentlemen, youngsters chatting and laughing loudly, as teenagers do, kids with skateboards and karts, outdoor terraces where people were having the traditional moules and frites lunch (mussels and fries, Belgian fries, mind you!). Everybody, from young to old, from sporty to romantic, was out. And me, photographing all this

All this fantastic material for black and white photography would be enough reason for me to like Oostende. But there is something more: the museum of the Belgian painter James Ensor, hosted in the house where he lived and painted for more than 30 years. His bizarre, unsettling, lonely, weird, different paintings with masks, carnivals, death, religious themes stayed in my mind for a long time.

That was Oostende for me. If you want to see the photos, take a look here. And if you haven’t visited already, I hope you will.