“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place,
we stay there, even though we go away.
And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”

Sometimes it feels as if I rediscover Ghent. One way or another the enchantment revives every now and then.
For the umpteenth time I wandered through the streets of Ghent accompanied by my camera.
The hard part about going out with my camera in Ghent is to avoid taking the same pictures all over again. 
Luckily the weather conditions sometimes allow you to take a completely different picture of the same old place.
Another variable are the people moving across your frame. Sometimes I avoid them, sometimes I embrace them.
Yesterday I decided to go both ways. Initially I wanted to capture the city itself, as bare as it can be. Empty and dark.
But soon enough I realized that conditions like these somehow seemed to draw attention to the vulnerable nature of people. 

Photographically, snowy conditions are perfect to emphasize this. If you don't want to overexpose the snow itself, you often end up slightly underexposing a scene, which makes everything look a little bit darker, moodier, dramatic. 
To be fair, I didn't have too much flexibility while taking the shots. Long exposures were a 'no go', at least if I wanted to make the snow look like actual snow. I didn't take my tripod with me anyway. My camera can handle a little snow, but it isn't designed to be exposed to it for 3 hours straight. So setting up a tripod every time I wanted to take picture wasn't possible.

Short shutter speeds in dark conditions resulted in high ISO. But who cares about some grain when there are specks all over your picture anyway.
After a couple of hours I called it a day, it turned out that my shoes weren't designed for conditions like these either :)