Sitting in airports during flight connections or in the planes during the flights themselves had an unexpected positive side effect: it gave me time to think about and process quite a bit of information that piled up earlier in the trip. This information was diverse both in form and in subject. It ranges from talks that I listened to at the conferences, meetings with colleagues, pictures I took, museums I visited, food I ate, conversations with parents that I had.
This processing mode was kind of forced on me, similar to the trip itself – a forced track back from Madrid to Voronezh to pick up a passport. I planned to make use of the airport time by reading and writing papers, and I did some of that, but travel is inherently tiring, so I often found myself staring out of the window, thinking about my travel experiences.
It is not surprising that thinking without trying to be productive is quite useful, but this work mode typically does not occur naturally. There are certain conditions that are conducive for it. In the case of this particular trip, they were:
- I was alone. Typically, I try to completely focus on my three-year-old daughter when I am with her, but this time, my family stayed in Madrid.
- There were no pressing but unimportant things to be done (like minor everyday stuff at home or at work).
- There really was a lot of information to process – the previous few weeks were full of new impressions and interactions.
- I had substantial chunks of time available, so I could do both “real work” and just think.
Unfortunately, replicating these conditions in everyday life is not easy – one almost has to be shaken out of the routine and forced into the “deep work” mode.
During my first visit to the Netherlands in the summer of 2011, I was caught by a tremendous thunderstorm at Kinderdijk. I was without an umbrella (which would have been useless in the strong wind anyway) and about three kilometres away from the nearest roof when the rain started. As a result, I was soaked through, miserably cold and became sick afterwards.
This is a good example of how photography enhances everyday activities, not just by capturing memories, but by truly adding value to the experience. My three-years-old daughter is used to being photographed, and she likes the process of taking pictures. I can see rudimentary signs of acting in her behaviour in front of the camera. I wonder if her interest in photos will grow with age or she will eventually become annoyed with parents taking her pictures. I have seen examples of the latter scenario in our friends’ children, but hope that being aware of her reactions will help me avoid pushing the photography beyond the point where it would lose its fun aspects for her. I would love to pick the brain of someone like 
that one of the most important educational aspects of baking for young children is learning the value of a systematic process, so baking makes a perfect subject for a documentary.
This time, however, I tried to be mindful and take photos that would be representative of my experience of that place and that moment – being tired after climbing hundreds of steps of a narrow spiral staircase, trying to imagine the thoughts of the artists, who created the countless sculptures that cover the cathedral, watching tourists enjoying a cool breeze on the rooftop or looking at their maps and planning visits to other sites…
I bought a two-day ticket, which allowed admission to various sites, including the terraces on the rooftop of the cathedral. From there, one can see small statues nested int the niches of the spires that face away from the streets below.
exclusively. It is wide enough to allow some flexibility for 
When I took photos of my mother and daughter baking together in a small kitchen, the quarters were so tight that I did not have much choice in terms of the composition. Fortunately, a 35 mm lens provides a wide enough field of view to allow some cropping afterwards. In terms of the colours, I did not want to convert the photos to black-and-white if at all possible, so I tried to position myself so that the brightly coloured background elements (e.g. a wall calendar, etc.) would not be in the frame. In this particular case, the scene itself, which has a lot of sentimental value for me, outweighs the technical shortcoming.