We've ended up, once again, somewhere between the years, one ending and one now being born. What the new year will be like, we cannot know, but what the other year was like, which is now coming to an end, each of us knows, but inevitably we begin to forget.
One way to overcome forgetfulness is... recapping.
At the end of the year, many people look back on the important events they have gone through and the achievements they have had, as well as the failures they have endured. These must be analyzed and we must learn.
With this in mind, I have also started a recap of the year that has ended, in terms of photos taken.
For several years, almost ten, I started to save my photos in folders, by the date I took them, by months.
This storage is a great help when I'm looking for something or want to do some statistics.
For me photography is not just an image, for the sake of the beauty of the image, it's a way to preserve memories. Every picture, even if it doesn't tell me a story of a thousand words, still tells me a story that helps me remember the context in which it was taken.
Photographs are a kind of external memory of the brain.
To further help this increasingly tired memory of mine, I thought to do, at the end of the year, a recap of the months of the year with the help of photos, selecting an image from each month that represents something important that happened that month.
It was hard to choose, so I had to divide it into four blogs, three months in chronological order, with more photos.
The sea is my great non-human love!
At first, in my childhood and adolescence, it was a blind love, because I wasn't close to the sea and only imagined what it looked like and would be like to be there.
When I turned 18, as a reward for overcoming a difficult illness, I was given a seaside vacation. Since then I have seen the sea every year, once or several times, like this year, when it was the maximum for me.
The sea will dominate this recap of the months of the year through photos because I've traveled to it five times.
For the first time in winter, in January. Because I was born on
January 2, I received a short vacation by the sea from my good friends, in Balchik, my favorite place on the Black Sea.
There was another novelty. The hotel we stayed at is away from the resort, in the middle of a huge park, which is a golf course.
The sea was far away from the hotel, I could see it and it was nice to look at it and dream about it without touching it.
This year's winter was nothing like a real winter. It was warm and there was no snow. It was a winter that looked like fall.
The climate in Balchik is semi-Mediterranean with lush vegetation. Now we have seen what it is like in winter when the trees have lost their leaves.
I've come close to the sea. There are only 7 km between the hotel and Balchick, which is set on the seafront and where walking was the only possible activity.
We thought we would be alone on the promenade but we met many people who love the sea in all conditions and seasons.
The Black Sea at Balchick in Bulgaria. January 2024!
February should have been the middle of winter.
It wasn't.
It was the same as January, an extension of fall.
I spent my free time in the Circus Park in Bucharest. I like this park because it brings a piece of nature into the middle of the big city.
Fortunately, the first month of spring was spring itself.
I traveled to northern Romania, where I grew up, in search of the spring I knew and which could not be the same in the city.
I like it best when I see the horizon. That's what I miss most in the city where I live now.
One of my favorite houses since childhood, mainly because of the birch trees. Nobody lives there now.
Close to the childhood village are the mountains. I took a short trip to the mountains, to see what spring is like there and for something more...
A deciduous forest with a few fir trees, announcing the higher mountains further away.
Firewood ready for winter. There is still a lot of it, this is a sign that the winter was mild.
A monastery was built in the middle of the forest. In the northeastern part of Romania, monasteries are everywhere, which is why this region, Suceava, is also called the land of monasteries.
Most monasteries are old, built in the 14th and 15th centuries. They are famous exterior painted monasteries of Bukovina, included in the UNESCO World Heritage.
This monastery was built in recent years and inaugurated earlier this year. Just when I visited it, in March 2024.
This is the only monastery built according to the model of the old ones, with paintings on the entire exterior of the building.
This was the first part of a series of four blogs to include selected photos from each month of this year, which has only a few hours left to live as I write this.
I rely mostly on photos in all my blogs. Words don't help me as much as photos.
I always start with photos when I want to write a blog. Photos remind me of places, events, and feelings that then turn into words. When I post in Photography Lovers the words have even less importance, they are a companion to the photos I want to show. This often makes the story uninteresting or common, yet it is necessary; otherwise, the photos would merely be a series of unexciting images.
I make this statement as a plea to those reading not to over-judge the text and to focus on the photos. The story puts everything in context and provides the explanations and clarifications necessary for the blog to convey something of interest to the reader.
Since we all love photography, let’s explore the captivating details captured in these photos.!
A wise saying goes that a photograph is worth a thousand words, but I don't think so.
It depends on the viewer.
Just a friendly heads-up: I'm keeping an eye on you!
