The old fence in my garden is no more. I delayed this moment for years, but eventually the ravages of time and climate got the best of it. This is the last shot for it. It could look like a thing of personal matter, and not so appropriate in a photoblog, but several images showed in time in these Chronicles were taken on it or around it (the Squirrel series, for one), as a matter of fact. Therefore it has full right to be saluted on these very pages. More than a bird: a living drill. That's the black woodpecker in brief. Essential element for the renewal and the biodiversity of the forest environment (the large holes it digs for nesting - being the only one capable to do it in that size - are reused by several other species of birds and even some mammals), I saw him dipping its beak in a trunk half a meter in diameter, working it as if it were of salt dough. In these very days from that oval hole young red crests of chicks ready to fly are eyeing... a photo I'm not going to take: like almost all of the pictures at nest (of any species) it would feel as the old same deja vù, even beyond any ethical doubt; besides, the aesthetic and emotional potential that could be included would be miserable, far from deserving the slightest form of potential annoyance. I'm posting instead a shot made during a casual encounter: the very hard and poor backlight let itself to be converted without a protest in a B&W high contrast image, a technique I used to love a lot already in my (very distant) days in the darkroom, when I manipulated sheets of photomechanical film among stinking chemical mixtures... thinking about it now, in the Instagram era, seems a lot like a picture from medieval alchemy. Yet no retouching software is able to give me back the same feelings. Who knows, maybe it was just me being different back then. Young, for a start.
The snow melted, and, as it happens every year, it has revealed tales and traces from the previous autumn and winter, kept hidden along the seven white months of the Swedish piedmont winter. Among these signs the remains of a moose, a casualty from autumn hunting. Besides the black & white in which I conceived the picture when I took it, I processed the image with a weak glowing effect, in order to enhance both the silkyness of the fur and the whiteness of the skull. |
All site contents are: © Vitantonio Dell'Orto, all rights reserved worldwide. The Chronicles of Särna, and other stories from the North.
I live in Sweden, in Särna (Dalarna). The Chronicles are a photo diary about the nature (but not just) here around and from all the Scandinavian areas where my photo job takes me.
My book: "My Sweden - Tales from an Italian photographer in the North" is available in the bookstores and by the publisher.
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