In the video below is the most unexpected thing you’ll see today. Watch it all the way through (it’s only 47 seconds) before reading any further. No spoilers.

If you’re reading this in an email and the video won’t play, trust me and head over to the full post online so you can watch it first.

Yesterday I was out on my usual walk along the seaside promenade — my absolute favorite route, one I’ve done literally hundreds of times over the years. I had my camera with me, but I’ve taken so many photos there already that I was struggling to find anything new. So I decided to slow down and look for interesting shapes and the play of light and shadow on the rocks instead.

That’s when I noticed my tiny neighbors.

Once I started paying closer attention, I realized the whole area was covered with ladybugs tucked away, sheltering from the wind, just like you see in the video. There were so many of them, spread across such a wide stretch, that this clearly wasn’t a one-off. It looks like they’ve got a proper little colony going there.

The funny thing is, I’ve walked right past them many times before, eyes scanning the distance for something “interesting,” completely missing what was right at my feet. Today I only found them because I was focused on the shapes of the rocks.

Photography really does change the way you see and connect with the world around you. Sometimes the best discoveries are hiding in plain sight — you just have to be looking in the right way.

Many years ago, I faced a decision that changed my life.

In the year 2000, when almost nobody was doing it yet, I started writing a blog. Then YouTube came along, and I opened my channel. Back then, there wasn’t the fierce competition we see today. If you offered a minimum of quality and understood how things worked, gaining traction was relatively easy. I published the first of what would become six books. Some of my articles reached the #1 spot worldwide on Google in their respective topics. Occasionally, strangers would recognize me on the street or when they heard the name of my online brand.

The specific details don’t matter anymore. The point is that I reached a stage where I could seriously consider becoming a full-time content creator. I had always turned down the frequent offers to put ads on my website or to write sponsored posts and reviews. But when the proposals started coming in at a much more serious level, I had to stop one day and really think about what I wanted to do.

At that time, my regular job was going very well and I was earning good money. But that wasn’t what convinced me. In fact, I had already hit the ceiling in my previous career. Years later, I ended up leaving it all behind to start studying from scratch in a completely different field.

I decided not to turn my hobby into a well-paid profession simply because what I enjoyed most about it was the freedom to choose it. I could do it when I wanted, and exactly how I wanted. If I tied something I loved so much to performance or results, and started depending on what others thought of my work, I would inevitably end up depending on other people. What had been a free activity would become a means to earn the things I needed to live. And that need would condition my freedom — and the happiness that freedom gave me. The extra money I could make wasn’t something I truly needed, and it wasn’t worth sacrificing anything for.

I turned down that offer just as I had turned down all the previous ones. I kept my blog 100% free of advertising and sponsorships. I even took the decision a step further: I realized that any kind of feedback about the success or failure of my content could potentially contaminate me. So I removed all audience analytics tools and disabled comments on my posts. From then on, I deliberately ignored my results.

That decision wasn’t just the right one — over time, I also noticed that my content started to change, just a little. When I reflected on it, I realized it now resembled even more what I truly wanted to create. Until that moment, without me even realizing it, there had been a subtle pressure to be accepted by my readers. It had been invisible. I only noticed it once it was gone, by contrast.

That blog lasted a total of 25 years. As I’ve already mentioned in my earlier posts here, last year I had the chance to leave everything behind and start a completely new life from zero. I published one final post, and since then I haven’t looked back.

A couple of days ago, I proposed an experiment to my new readers here — one that is already underway. In one of the messages I received, the person mentioned that sending postcards could be a good idea if I ever wanted to monetize it, especially once I start traveling. They suggested that other readers like them might enjoy receiving postcards with photos from different places around the world and would be willing to pay for a subscription that could help support my project.

It’s a good idea, but I’m not sure if it might end up conditioning me. I wonder whether there’s a way to offer something that others might like without giving up even a small part of my freedom. I’ll think about it. Maybe one day I’ll come up with something that feels right. But for now, I believe the answer has to be “no.”

The first 10 people who email me will receive a free postcard in their mailbox, anywhere in the world.

As I mentioned in previous posts, I’m working with some friends on a small local photography project. The goal is to earn some extra money alongside my office job so I can save up and, when the time is right, dedicate the rest of my life to the “How to become a ghost” project.

One of the services we’re going to offer is sending personalized photo postcards. Customers will be able to choose the photos they like, and we’ll mail them to whoever they want.

But before we can offer this as a proper professional service, we need real-world experience: we have to fine-tune our production process and, most importantly, gather accurate information about how long the postcards take to arrive and in what condition they get there. That’s exactly where you, reader of this blog, can help me.

Here’s the plan:

I’ve set up a temporary email address just for this experiment (I’ll delete it afterwards). The first 10 people who want to participate will need to do the following:

1. Choose one of the photos you’ll see below.

2. Send me an email like this:

   

3. I’ll create the postcard with your chosen photo and the recipient exact details you provide, and I’ll send it by regular mail. International shipping can take a while in some parts of the world (up to a month in some cases), but if the address is correct and there are no postal issues, it should arrive safely.

4. When you receive the postcard, you’ll notice it has a new (also temporary) email address written on it. Please send your feedback to that address and include:

   • The delivery date (when it arrived in your mailbox)

   • Two photos of the received postcard (front and back, similar to the image at the top of this post)

That’s it.

So you’ll get a free postcard with a photo you like from where I live, and I’ll get extremely valuable real-life data on how this service actually works across many different countries and regions.

Here are the photos you can choose from:

1. cats

   

2. Timanfaya

   

3. cactus

   

4. ship

   

5. promenade

   

6. rocks

   

7. windsurf

   

8. baywatch

   

9. beach

   

10. rust

    

Post update: sorry, the postcards requests are closed and the email has been already deleted. Depending on the feedback I get from those who did send me their requests maybe I’ll open new slots in the future.

Today you’re seeing the same thing as in my previous posts, but not really.

As I’ve mentioned a few times, my daily walk always follows the exact same route. And it’s through a tourist area that holds zero photographic interest for me, which actually makes the challenge even greater. If my plan ever works out down the line, I’ll get lost in the streets of Hong Kong, New York, or St. Petersburg—but for now, the farthest I can go is Playa Honda. That’s just how it is.

Still, I’m enjoying photography more every day, and I keep pushing myself to get the most out of it within my current limits. Since I can’t change the scenery, lately I’ve been focusing on changing myself instead.

I’ve started experimenting with longer shutter speeds than the near-instant ones most people use by default. I’m not yet into true long-exposure or ultra-long-exposure photography (the kind that produces truly mind-blowing results), but I’ve been playing with my camera’s shutter speed to better understand what kinds of effects even small adjustments from normal values can create.

The goal of today’s experiment was simple: to combine sharp and blurred elements in the same frame. I wasn’t chasing anything particularly artistic this time—just building the technical skill I’ll need later in this project, when I will apply it for real narrative and creative purposes. In the meantime, I learned a ton, so the test was definitely a success.

You can achieve this effect with either a camera or a phone. There are detailed YouTube tutorials that walk you through it, and the results can be really striking. For example, if you’re after a powerful portrait, photograph someone looking straight into the lens on a busy street full of people walking past. Keep your subject perfectly sharp while everyone else around them turns into motion blur. The contrast is incredibly strong.

But all of this is just one practical example of the idea that actually matters: finding ways to push past obstacles and keep moving forward. No camera? Use your phone. Hong Kong feels too far away? There’s always somewhere nearby with something worth photographing. Can’t reach new places? You can still evolve the way you see the ones you already know. If you really want it, there’s always a path.

Today I’m going to talk about a hidden superpower that you also have, even if you don’t realize it yet.

As you’ve probably noticed from recent posts, I always take the same walking route. It’s a long path that takes me about three and a half hours round trip. It has two distinct parts: first a stretch that runs along the sea, with the airport on one side and the beach on the other, and then it turns into a street that still follows the coastline but now runs through the tourist urban area.

The views are beautiful, the quality of life on this island is amazing, and overall it’s a paradise. But I’ve already explained here that this kind of photography doesn’t interest me at all and that, for me, it feels like a prison that limits my creativity. Still, this life and artistic project demands discipline and consistency, so whenever possible I leave the house with the camera because—even if I don’t feel like photographing what’s there—I need to keep my senses sharp.

Here’s the thing: although I almost always do this same walk with the camera in hand, sometimes I don’t. And right from the start I noticed something striking. Physically it’s the exact same route, yet my experience of walking it is completely different depending on whether I’m carrying the camera or not.

When I don’t have the camera, I walk lost in my thoughts, sometimes listening to music or some interesting content, and occasionally glancing at something curious that catches my eye. But since I’ve seen these places a thousand times and know every grain of sand, every walk is just another walk.

Now, when I do have the camera and I’m in hunting mode, the path becomes something else entirely. I scan everywhere, I’m hyper-aware of every detail around me, I notice both the big picture and the tiny things, I unconsciously and instantly evaluate every potential frame to decide whether there’s a shot worth taking, and my photographic eye is wide open. Suddenly the world around me turns into something much richer and more intense, and I feel deeply connected to it.

At first, when you’re just starting in photography, people talk about “the photographer’s eye” and you take it as some theoretical, abstract concept. Sure, some people seem to have a natural talent for seeing interesting things in interesting ways, but that appears to be it.

After you’ve been taking photos for a while, though, you discover a reality no one ever told you about. Capturing things in an image isn’t really the point in itself—it doesn’t matter. It’s only the practical result of something far more important: the real superpower that makes someone a true photographer, which is the ability to connect with the world in a completely different way. When you enter that mode, when you realize your senses can operate differently, when you live that experience yourself, you understand that this is what actually makes the difference. Whether the photos turn out good or bad is almost beside the point.

If you’re curious, try it. You don’t need anything special—not even a proper camera. Your phone is enough. Remember: the photos are just the end product. What you’re after is something that happens and that you live before you even press the shutter. The first few times you probably won’t feel anything special because opening the third eye takes time. The good news is that you don’t have to do anything complicated. Just carve out some time in your life dedicated exclusively to making photographs—or, more accurately, to seeing like a photographer.

At the beginning you’ll come home, look at the day’s shots, see that almost all of them are pretty bad, and feel discouraged. But you’ll be looking in the wrong place. The photos themselves don’t matter. What matters is the experience. Try again the next day, and the day after, and the day after that. Little by little you’ll start noticing something new happening. Those slots you set aside just for taking pictures will begin to feel different. During those moments, you’ll start to become something different.

Paper photography is dead.

I mean for the general public. Of course there will always be small niches where certain people still want —and are willing to pay for— specific photos in physical form, but for most people in everyday life, the phone screen is more than enough.

Even though the source might be the same, a photo on a screen is a completely different product from a print you can actually hold in your hands. The digital shift that came with the new century closed one door and opened another, and it permanently changed our relationship with photography: how many we take, how many we look at, how long we spend with each individual image, how and with whom we share them, what purpose they serve or what they give us, and how we react to the ones other people share.

I don’t think this change is inherently good or bad: it simply is what it is. Before, technical limitations gave real weight and value to every photo we took or showed someone. Now we have unlimited photos at zero cost; we can pick whichever one we like best and share it with people we’ve never met on the other side of the planet with one click. The world changed, photography changed, and I don’t see much point in asking which version is “better” because the comparison doesn’t really make sense. They’re separate universes, each with its own strengths and qualities.

But I love photography —all of it: the old kind and the new kind.

And I want both to be part of the How to Become a Ghost project, because each one brings different shades and both are necessary to make the whole thing complete. As I explained in the previous post, I have a very detailed plan for what I’ve decided the rest of my life will be, and that plan also includes how I want to share the photographic record of this journey with you. This blog will be the main axis of the artistic side of the project, but there will also be physical pieces that I’ll show when the time comes.

In the meantime there’s still a lot to learn, so lately I’ve been studying the technical side of photographic printing production. At the same time I ordered some A3 test prints from an online service to experiment and spot my mistakes firsthand. The results came back with some clear flaws, but the goal was to gain real knowledge and hands-on experience —and that part worked. I’ll keep at it.

I’m 53 and I’ve decided to spend whatever years I have left on this one project.

On a personal level, the end goal is to sever every meaningful connection I have and spend the rest of my life drifting among people like a ghost—unseen, unnoticed, and unremembered—until I die somewhere no one will care to look. On the creative side, I want to document the whole thing photographically here on the blog (and through whatever other channels I build along the way): first the process of actually becoming that ghost, and later the view from inside—how the fully detached, dehumanized ghost sees and experiences a world it no longer really touches. That paragraph sums up, in plain words, what will be my entire future if everything goes according to plan.

As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, putting any of this into practice has already hit unexpected walls. I have a remote job that should, in theory, let me live anywhere. But European law requires me to physically spend at least half the year in the country where my contract is registered. That single rule suddenly creates a whole pile of complications—travel, visas, residency issues—that I hadn’t counted on. So as long as I need to keep working and paying taxes here, it’s logistically impossible to fully commit to the plan.

That means my life now splits into two clear phases.

Phase one lasts until retirement (about 15 years from now) or until any point when I can live without needing to work. During this time the best realistic option is preparation: building the conditions for what comes later, experimenting, gaining knowledge and experience, traveling when possible, and saving whatever resources will help when the time arrives.

Phase two begins the moment I get real freedom—no more legal ties, no more obligations. That’s when the actual ghost phase starts: full, uncompromised disappearance.

I’m deliberately not getting specific about phase two yet. Fifteen years is a long time; experience has taught me that circumstances will almost certainly force changes to the strategy or limit what’s even possible. So for now I’m keeping it at the broad concept. We’ll see what it actually looks like when I get there.

The preparation phase, though, already has concrete steps in motion.

My biggest current bottleneck is money for travel. My remote salary covers living comfortably, but it doesn’t stretch to trips. I’ve never enjoyed traveling for its own sake and I have zero interest in tourism, but both personally and creatively it matters for the plan: the experience will feed the knowledge I’ll need later, and the kind of photography I want to do here requires contact with different places and situations. So I need to figure out a way to do it. But how?

The answer is straightforward: more work.

I’ve teamed up with friends to start a small photography business focused on tourism-related projects. If it takes off, it will eat a lot of my free time and leave little room for anything else, but it should generate the extra funds this preparation stage needs. Since the work is still photography, it should also sharpen my eye and indirectly benefit the blog.

That probably means less time soon for the spontaneous, uncommissioned photography that’s the real heart of this project, and posts here may become less frequent. But I’ll do what I can to keep both going. Whenever I have a set of images I think you’ll find worth seeing, I’ll share them with you.

In this post I’m going to talk about photography, and this will change the way you look at other people’s photos from now on.

There are basically two ways of working in street photography (and it applies to other genres too), and they affect both the photographer’s experience and the kind of images that end up being produced. Most people can already sense the difference without putting it into words, but once someone points it out, you’ll never look at a photo the same way again: you’ll spot which approach was used, and you’ll feel much closer to the photographer because you understand how the picture came to be.

“Fishing” refers to photographs that require planning, preparation, and often a good deal of patience while you wait for the exact moment. The photographer already knows what they want before pressing the shutter. They find the right spot, frame the scene carefully, choose the angle they need, adjust the light if they can, or simply wait until the natural light becomes exactly what they pictured in their head. And if they’re shooting on the street, they wait for the right person to walk into precisely the right place—or for every element to align the way they had already visualized. Images created this way tend to be more beautiful, more “perfect,” and more graphically striking.

“Hunting,” on the other hand, is about spontaneous capture. The hunting photographer doesn’t know what they’re going to find. They just pick up the camera and shoot whatever catches their eye in the moment. The picture isn’t the result of calculation or advance setup; the photographer acts far less like a craftsman building a scene and much more like a quiet witness to whatever happens around them. Photos made this way usually give up technical perfection—composition, lighting, precision—in exchange for freshness, naturalness, and a stronger sense of being immersed in real life.

Both approaches have their own value. Which one you lean toward usually depends on your personality, your creative needs at that moment, or the specific goal you have for the photograph (getting likes on social media, for instance). Sometimes a single image can show traces of both mindsets, but in most cases you’ll be able to look at almost any photo from now on and tell pretty quickly which path the photographer took.

Yesterday afternoon I was in the island’s capital (Arrecife), and since the temperature was nice and there were still a couple of hours of good light left, I decided to walk around with the camera and see what happened. It’s a small city with very narrow streets in the older parts, so a fishing photographer would probably think twice and bring a wide-angle lens to capture what they want even without much distance. But I want to be a ghost—and a ghost, by definition, has to be a hunter. I was carrying a long zoom, completely the wrong tool for those tight streets, so I had to make do and stick mostly to open areas. Still, I enjoyed the walk.

The photos you’re about to see are from my absolute favourite walk in the world.

As you know, this kind of photography doesn’t interest me at all and it’s not what this blog is about, but today I enjoyed the walk so much that I’m making an exception.

Between 2006 and 2008 I lived in a hotel right on Matagorda beach — exactly where the red arrow is on the left side of the map at the top of this post. My company relocated me there for work and put me up in a room where I spent those two years living out of nothing more than a carry-on bag.

I spent all day inside the hotel, so when my shift finished it was already getting dark and I would go out for a couple of hours of walking. I alternated between two routes: one headed southwest (the one I showed you in the previous post), or northwest along the promenade that runs between the airport and the sea, all the way to the local residential area called Playa Honda.

This afternoon I did the northwest walk in reverse: I parked the car in Playa Honda, walked the coastal path past the airport until I reached my old hotel, then turned around and came back the same way. The other big difference from when I lived there is that in winter I usually finished work almost at dusk, so the walk home was in complete darkness (back then the airport had no night flights and they switched off all the lights). I loved hearing nothing but the sea in the pitch-black night.

Actually, I hadn’t planned to bring my camera today. As you know, Lanzarote isn’t appealing for the kind of photography I enjoy, and I just wanted to do the walk the way I used to — without thinking about anything else. But in the end I threw it in the bag anyway, and because of that I can now share the photos you’ll see below. They’re in chronological order: the first one was taken just after I got out of the car in Playa Honda, and the last one only a couple of minutes before I got back.

The opening photo is the only one in this whole gallery that I think is actually worth anything. I took it before coming to Lanzarote: I stepped out of the house, the light hit those plants in a way I liked, I snapped the picture and kept walking. It wasn’t prepared, I didn’t wait for anything special to happen… The moment was just there, I saw it, and that’s what came out.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Lanzarote is paradise if you want to live or visit — but not if you’re after the kind of photography that interests me. There are basically three types of places here: where the locals actually live (where I’m living now), where the tourists stay, and the famous spots tourists go to visit.

Last time I showed you what the first kind looks like. Today it’s the second one: yesterday I went to one of those tourist residential zones, a small seaside town. It’s basically a theme park made of hotels, apartments and every kind of little business that feeds off them — all watching their customers get replaced every week so the whole hospitality and entertainment cycle can start over again. The island’s economy depends almost entirely on this system, and the authorities put huge effort into making sure visitors feel comfortable and leave with a nice, pleasant experience they’ll want to tell their friends about.

And that very “industrial perfection” is exactly what inevitably poisons what I’m trying to do as an unintentional photographer.

Below are some shots from yesterday’s walk, from mid-afternoon until I got back after dark. Almost everything is the same clichés we’ve all seen a thousand times and that I find completely uninteresting… but that’s what’s here. The next fifteen years are going to feel very long.

Lanzarote is a wonderful island, and for me, that’s a big problem.

Many years ago, I was here with a friend, and she said something that stuck with me: “You told me this was paradise, and of course I believed you—the photos you showed me were incredible. But now I realize I could never truly grasp just how much until I got here. No matter how many pictures you see or stories you hear, you can’t understand the beauty of this island until you’re standing on it.”

Picture a place with spectacular volcanic landscapes, endless beaches, one of the best climates in the world—averaging around 18°C in the depths of winter and 28°C in the height of summer—about 340 days of sunshine a year, low humidity, and hardly any rain. Tourism is limited and carefully managed to protect the island, safety is top-notch, infrastructure and connectivity are on par with mainland Europe, and there’s stunning beauty in every direction you look. Anyone would want to live in a place like that, right?

In terms of pure quality of life, it’s hard to beat Lanzarote. If all I wanted was a comfortable bubble in a luxurious paradise—if I didn’t have a bigger plan for the final chapter of my life—I could say I’ve got it all. I live in a small, quiet apartment in a beautiful spot surrounded by nature, I have a remote job with no fixed hours or commitments, and I can afford a minimalist, simple lifestyle. It’s the dream for a lot of people.

But none of that appeals to me. Lanzarote doesn’t matter to me—I want to become a ghost. I want to drift among people who don’t know me, who don’t care about me, and who won’t remember me. The kind of solitude I’m after isn’t physical isolation in a place with no one around; it’s the feeling you only get when you’re surrounded by crowds, yet walking among them without really being there. I want to view the world from another dimension, using photography as my only real link to it, and document my journey into nothingness on this blog.

As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, I’m stuck in my home country until I retire in about 15 years, so my bigger goals have to wait for now. The only thing I can do toward this project is gain some partial experience: save what I can, travel when possible, and piece together what a full ghost life might feel like, learning from each trip. I’ll keep sharing what I discover in future posts.

The photos with this post were taken this morning. This winter has been unusually cold (“cold”) and rainy (“rainy”) here—nothing like it has been seen since the 1980s—and since the forecast said this stretch of bad weather was ending today, I headed out with my camera after breakfast. I spent a couple of hours driving around, deliberately avoiding the most famous tourist spots and just stopping to shoot whenever something caught my eye.

I’m no landscape photographer, the sun and blue sky haven’t fully returned yet so the light wasn’t great, and the ground is greener than I like after all the rain instead of the usual desert tones. But I think these shots do give a sense of what Lanzarote looks like away from the visitor hotspots. If you want to see the more famous areas, click here.

The law in my country won’t let me emigrate. And from what I can tell, it’s the same across Europe because the rule comes from European Union legislation: if you’re paying into social security in one country but working remotely and moving permanently elsewhere, you either have to unregister in your home country (and quit your job) or, if your company is willing to jump through all the hoops, set up a branch in the new country and hire you from there. Yes, it’s that ridiculous.

What everyone in my position does is just leave anyway—either because they don’t know the rule exists or because they figure nothing will ever happen. And most of the time, that’s true. But not always: sometimes the penalties hit, and they’re brutal. There’s no way to know if one day you’ll be the one getting an official notice: no, thanks. I’ve looked into alternatives, but they all carry legal risk and feel shaky. At 53, I can’t afford that kind of uncertainty. So what can I do?

I’ve got a Plan B, and I must say it looks quite good. Just recently, I found a place away from my hometown where I can live in complete solitude for half the year. After that, I can head anywhere else for the remaining months without any restrictions. It’s more expensive and less convenient than my original idea, but it’s temporary—about 15 years until retirement, and then I’ll be completely free. When I started this project, I knew I’d run into problems of every kind, but this is reaching absurd levels. Anyway, I’m not giving up.

Since I’m going to be a part-time prisoner, at least the place I’m moving to is my absolute favorite spot in the world, with a combination of natural features and climate that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else on Earth. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be settled in, and I’ll share the first photos.

This is the last post I’ll publish before I leave my country. The preparation phase is over; from here on out, the plan actually starts. I’m about to become a ghost—completely disconnected from the world—and I’ll use this blog to document whatever feels relevant or useful to anyone else attempting something similar. Every bit of effort, money, and time I have left will go into creating the photographic narrative products that will reflect the gaze of someone who walks without leaving footprints. I’m getting old, this project is the only thing I care about anymore, and the only promise I can make is that I’ll do it as well as I possibly can.

These photos were taken long before the idea of dropping everything and vanishing even crossed my mind. I was just starting to get into photography and wanted to learn, so I’d wander around my neighborhood practicing with whatever caught my eye. Back then I had a cheap camera and some ancient manual lenses, which is why a few of these have limited technical quality. On top of that, I never keep originals—I pulled everything here from my old social media accounts, where images are automatically compressed. But the moments are what matter, and I loved every second of teaching myself this craft.

The very last shot is different from the rest; I took it with a cheap phone. I’d stepped out of my apartment to take out the trash, saw this scene, and just snapped it without overthinking. Gear doesn’t matter nearly as much as the feeling you get when something in front of you demands to be captured.

If nothing gets in the way, I’ll be leaving my home country in about a month and the real process of turning into a ghost will begin.

In the last post I covered the creative side of the plan. This one is the practical roadmap for the immediate future. The big decisions are already made; what’s left are minor details.

My original idea was to vanish completely—move to some part of the world that has nothing to do with anything I’ve ever known and spend the rest of my life drifting from place to place. Reality, however, put two hard limits on that goal: money and visas.

I have a remote job and I can live on almost nothing, so as long as I don’t lose it and end up having to cancel everything, I can keep going until retirement age. But my income isn’t enough for constant travel, which means I need a cheap base I can actually stay in most of the time, save money, and take occasional trips. It’s not the pure nomadic disappearance I wanted, but it’s the closest realistic version I can pull off.

The catch is that a “base” requires legal long-term residency, and that’s where visas become the bottleneck. I’m European. My first cultural target was Asia, but (to make a long story short) there’s no viable long-term option for someone with my profile—except marriage, which is not an option. So what’s left?

End of January or early February 2026, I’m moving to Malta. It’s in the EU, I can get temporary residence permits that automatically turn permanent after five years, I can afford it on my current salary, and it’s the farthest I can realistically go under my constraints. I don’t know a single person there and no one’s likely to visit, so at least the “becoming a ghost” part will be satisfied.

I probably won’t be able to do any proper photo trips abroad during the first year, but that’s fine because November 2026 brings the last remaining social obligation I have left. Years ago I introduced two friends who are now getting married; since they met through me, they’ve asked me to officiate the wedding. I’ll fly back from Malta for that, stay a few extra days to say goodbye to my closest family, and—if everything works out the way I want it to—that will be the moment I leave my home country for good.

Malta, December 2026. If life doesn’t derail me before then, the day I land back on the island will be the day I’ve finally left everything behind. That’s when the next phase of the plan begins.

This post lays out the full roadmap for the creative side of Project Ghost, from start to finish. The next one will cover my personal life journey, which will run parallel to the photography and, if everything goes according to plan, will last the rest of my days.

The adventure itself hasn’t started yet (I’ll get into the exact dates in the next post), but these preparatory months are perfect for making sure everything that comes later is technically flawless.

Let’s fast-forward to the moment I leave this place for good, walk away from everyone who’s been part of my life until then, and the ghosting process actually begins.

Project Ghost will unfold along several artistic tracks:

• First, this blog will serve as the logbook. I’ll keep posting whatever I learn along the way and share photos I simply like—no stricter filter than that. I figure some of this might be useful to anyone who’s ever considered doing something similar with their own life. But the site also has a built-in “kill switch” that I’ll explain in a minute.

• Second, the photo books. There will be two separate lines: a periodic one featuring chosen images from each distinct time period that naturally belong together (each photo in every book will work like a single episode within a season of a TV series, and the entire Ghost project will be the full show); and a completely independent line, a few “special” books. I can’t say more about those in advance, because figuring out some of their details on your own will be part of the experience of holding them for the first time.

• And finally, the photographic prints. I’ve found a service with top-tier quality that ships worldwide, and I’ll spend this entire prep year running every possible test so that every single image I choose for the physical collection is absolutely perfect. If I’m pouring the rest of my life into this, every detail has to be worth it.

So how does Project Ghost actually end? That’s the best part. There are only two possible endings: success or failure.

If I fail, I’ll just keep going until I die. One day the posts will stop coming, no new products will appear, and anyone who’s been following along will know it’s over. That’s the default ending if nothing extraordinary happens. It will mean my final life adventure didn’t work out. And that’s fine—failure is part of life, part of projects, part of art. If it ends that way, so be it.

But is there any extraordinary mechanism that could flip the script and make it a success? Yes—and that’s where the kill switch on this blog comes in. Here are the current stats as I write this:

The moment either of these two things happens—my subscriber count hits zero, or a new post gets zero views in the entire week after it goes live (I think that’s a fair window)—everything stops instantly. I will never log back into Substack to check anything, no more posts, the book series freeze exactly where they are, no more prints available. No goodbyes, no explanations, nothing.

Whatever happens after that doesn’t matter. The day those conditions are met—the day I can reasonably conclude that nobody cares about this project anymore, that nobody remembers me—will be the happiest day of this final chapter of my life.

I will have succeeded. I’ll finally be a real ghost.

I love taking photos, but I don’t want to take good ones.

In my past life as a blogger and YouTuber, I spent years mastering every technical aspect of videography. The goal was that nothing I wanted to do should ever be out of reach. It took countless hours of theory and practice, but I got there.

When I started getting into photography a few years ago, I did the exact same thing. I went deep into the fundamentals, explored and practiced every genre and aspect I thought I’d need, and eventually reached the point where technique is no longer a limitation. If the results suck now, it’s because that’s the best I can do—not because I’m missing some piece of knowledge.

Lately, though, I’ve been rethinking all of it, and I’ve realized I got the whole concept wrong. I’m going to have to unlearn almost everything I’ve learned.

This project isn’t about photography. It’s about how a human slowly fades, turns into a ghost, and disconnects from the world around it while the world quietly disconnects from it in return. Nobody looks twice. Nobody cares. Nobody remembers you once you’ve walked past. Photography is just one layer of the real project: a record of that vanishing act.

When a photographer sets up a shot—thinking about light, composition, the relationship between subject and environment, all the usual stuff—they’re engaging with the world. Everything around them feeds into the work; it’s raw material they shape into the image they want.

My goal is the opposite: to drift through whatever place I’m in without ever really connecting to it, just grabbing whatever details catch my eye from some other plane of reality. It’s not that I don’t want to plan or refine shots to make them “good”—trying to make them good is itself a contamination. It defeats the entire point of becoming a ghost.

To get the opening photo, zoom in on the detail:

A while back, I mentioned in another post that I’m the only one in the entire office with permanent remote work. That sparked a huge backlash from colleagues who didn’t get the same deal (I got it because my move abroad was unavoidable), though things have calmed down over time. I keep the lowest profile possible in emails and all communications, lock down my social media, and do everything I can to deliver on my job without drawing attention. I’m basically a corporate ghost.

Now I’ve had to come back temporarily to my hometown, and if my coworkers find out I’m around, it’ll inevitably reignite the flames. And of course, if I end up swinging by the office even briefly, once I wrap up my stuff here and head out again, my remote work exception will stir up trouble all over. Best case: nobody finds out.

I’ve shaved my head, grown a beard, switched up my wardrobe, wear a cap pulled low everywhere, and picked up some non-prescription glasses to round out the disguise. I also carry a cross-body bag that shifts my center of gravity and gait a bit with the weight, while hiding my build. The new persona is so spot-on that not even my neighbors have recognized me.

Still, I steer clear of crowded areas and key spots in the city, and today I wandered with my camera through rundown neighborhood streets that I figured would be empty at that hour. And they were: aside from a few critters that steer clear of people, it was a walk of pure silence and calm. I love this feeling.

I’ve been back in my hometown for a few days now, setting new foundations to restart the plan. I don’t know exactly how long it will take before I leave again, but once I resolve the pending matters, I’ll disappear—this is just a temporary situation. Hardly anyone knows I’m here (and I’ve changed my appearance considerably so that no one recognizes me on the street and avoids any issues), so in a sense, my daily life is already not far from being that of a true ghost.

The photos from the previous posts were taken in the temporary city where I resided for four months, and starting with these new ones, they’ll be from where I live now. It’s interesting how, despite using the same photographic equipment, everything appears different: not only is the location completely distinct and thus the content changes, but the light and colors themselves have a clearly differentiated character. It’s another world.

The photo opening this post is interesting because of the story behind it.

For the past four months, I’ve been living in a city where 70% of the population is African Muslim. I came here for work, collaborating with a team of European specialists, which made it easy to ask them about the many striking things I’ve encountered during my time here. I want this blog to focus on photography, but I could share some truly wild stories about what I’ve seen in this place. I’m leaving for good next week.

When I first arrived, I spent hours walking the city and noticed that most houses had their windows covered or shut tight all day. I assumed they were empty, but that seemed odd given the sheer number and the high real estate prices I’d looked up online.

To cut a long story short, those houses aren’t empty. Muslim families live there, and the reason everything is sealed shut is that the men don’t allow their women to be seen by other men when any part of their body is uncovered. So, to let women move around the house in regular clothes, the solution is to keep everything closed and rely on artificial light. Windows only open for ventilation when the women are fully covered or out of the house.

And that brings us to the photo. I took it in a part of the city where only Muslims live, and, naturally, everything is shuttered. But I guess this family’s beliefs don’t say anything specific about underwear, and what’s not explicitly forbidden is allowed. The world is more livable thanks to the gray areas.

My first try at becoming a ghost didn’t work out, but the plan’s still alive. I’ve just gotten word that my work contract wraps up in a couple of weeks, and I’ll be leaving the place I’ve been staying for the past three months to head back to my hometown. There are things I need to sort out there, and I can’t hit the road again until they’re done. But once they are, I’ll be ready to start fresh. What comes next depends on how things unfold, so for now, I’m holding off and will make new decisions when the time’s right.

Since I’m leaving, I’m sharing some photos I’d been saving for future posts I thought I’d write while still living in this city. This isn’t a place I’ll miss.