The people who were the most terrified of this virus were the elderly. Indeed, the effects of the disease were all the more vicious for this part of the population. This justified fear forced many families into isolation. Many thought it would only last a few weeks - at most. But weeks became months, months soon became a whole year. The vaccination campaign came as a salvation for many as it marked the end of a very lonely imprisonment.

I’ll finish this section with a last interesting picture. The Belgian Royal Palace in a standoff against a dropped facial mask. the symbol of our Might against the symbol of our weakness… :-)

Simmerath, Germany

Simmerath is a beautiful municipality close to the city of Aachen. Initially I drove there to visit old bunkers and anti-tank walls of the Second World War. My favourite image of the trip turned out to be very different, indeed. A wonderful warm and silent evening bathed this beautiful landscape in pink sunset light. Only the sounds of birds and the subtle whoosh of the windmills was hearable. Vorsprung durch Technik.

Bruges, Belgium

Visiting Bruges during the winter was absolutely worth it. Tourism is almost inexistent, especially later during the evenings. A very good friend of mine gave me a wonderful tour through the old city and this shot turned out to be my favourite one. I used my Fujifilm X-T3 with a standard lens but added a Neutral Density filter on it. What is that exactly? This filter functions as a kind of sunglass for cameras, blocking a significant amount of light. The filter is specifically designed to block all wavelengths equally in order to avoid colour shifts. (Unlike real sunglasses that tend to modify colours significantly).

By now you will probably have noticed that I love to use ND-filters… I guess one of the reasons I use them is that they enhance tranquility and serenity in pictures - two emotions that I find particularly appealing in landscape photography. If I had shot this with a normal lens and normal settings, the car on the left-hand side of the canal would have been very visible and would draw too much attention. Now you can barely see it.

Berlin (2019-2020, Christmas)

In the autumn of the year 2000 we moved to Frohnau (Berlin) where we stayed for four years. During that period, I had to take the train to go to school and our village was located at the terminus of the S-Bahn. The message played to announce the terminus isn’t something my siblings and I will quickly forget. It was refreshing to come back during the Christmas holidays in 2019.

When I was living in Berlin as a child, I remembered it as a dirty, miserable place that recently crawled out of years of Cold War misery. Punk was the way of life, graffiti and colored mohawk hairstyles were omnipresent in the streets. Coming back more than a decade later to visit my parent’s new home was an amazing experience. So much had changed since then. It is now such a wonderful city with an inexorable supply of culture and art. It is alive, it is growing and you can truly feel the warm beating heart of a young and eager metropole.

Passo Gardena, Italy

During the beautiful August summer of 2020, I went on a wonderful hiking trip in Italy with two great friends. It was my first visit to the Dolomites but it’s definitely not going to be the last one ;-)