There's A Very Healthy And Well Known Practice In Photography
Shoot and walkaway. Well, shoot and after a while revisit the saved image folder with new eyes. It is good to do, the preconceived ideas about the photoshoot/s have fallen away. Over the last few weeks this has been taken to an extreme. I decided to revisit the Italian trip from last year. There wasn't a web gallery they fitted into, so I just hadn't bothered to spend any real time selecting, editing and grading the best images from that trip for printing. In part at the time I struggled capturing images without other tourists in them, the humans bothered me. There was a process of going, well, if you can't avoid them celebrate them.
Wait, that's not Italy! It's the famous Singapore Merlion on our stop over to Italy. And in fact the start of the thread of a theme throughout theItalia Gallery, which is to reflect human interaction with built environs, both modern and ancient. Ok, sounds a bit verbose. But going through the 10 month old folder of 4000 images gave a new freedom, to be more critical with less emotion attached to compositions. I found myself making new panoramics from images I'd composed. To explain that a bit better; when you make digital panoramics they are a series of vertical [portrait] images shot in a row that overlap, these slices of the scene are then stitched together in post. The overlaps give the photo software the information of where to join the images to make one big long image. So knowing that, when you are shooting, although you have preconceived your composition, it's shrewd to over shoot to the left and right. By having extra wiggle room either side you can completely change the composition of the resulting pano. Computers hate making panos, in fact I've already killed one MacBook Pro with them.
Vernasa, Chinque Terra Pano. The sunbathers to the left of the pano add context to the composition. Days have been spent rediscovering images, and yeah reliving the Italy month a lot. But applying the shoot and walk away theory worked a treat. I found pano compositions I'd taken but had originally discounted. And frames I had liked at the time of taking that now I loved.
Riomaggiore Pastels, the soft evening light on the terraced houses, the swimmers in the lower left corner...just makes you wanna be in there. There is no way the 20 selected images now live up on PhotoCPL.co.nz would have been the selection straight after the trip. Some would have been discarded as too cliche...actually Riomaggiore would fall into that category. New eyes and a fresh thought process changes everything.
Vernasa Nights Pano. There's that human interaction again, one theme I did really what to capture at the time of the trip was Piazza life. The original pano was in colour, but revisiting it there was a realisation that the colours actually distracted from what was going on in the scene, the diners were overwhelmed but gaudy splashes of contrasting colours. A lot of the Italia Gallery is regraded to black and white. There's a timelessness about black and white.
Ponte Vecchio Reflections. Then of course, there's just happening to be there at the right time and place. It could be claimed there was extensive scouting undertaken to find this angle, but truth be told we were exhausted after a day of beating the feet around Florence and found a riverside bar that happened to have a deck over the Arno.
Rapolano Sky. This one was most definitely on the preconceived shot list, not EXACTLY the hilltop town of Rapolano Terme, but the idea of a medieval town and ancient olive trees...did you know an olive tree's average life span is 500 years but can live for 1500 years. These ones are oldies, indicated by the trunk thickness.
So, there's the over thought process that's consumed quite a few weeks and the sample of the Italia Gallery that's now live. If you've been to Italy I hope it brings the memories flooding back. What do you think? Let me know.
And over on Recreational Society ....
There's a nice bit of inspo from Daniel and Chole from OverlandNZ... check out their truck!!! Epic
You can read all about their set up and adventures HERE
Oh yeah, the Recreational Society has a Facebook Page too... give it a like :)
An oldie but damn, still a goodie! Inside Looking Out MkI is currently getting printed at 1200mm wide and getting sent to it's new owner in Arrowtown. Shot with an 8mm Russian lens when I was going through the Crawford/Greenough stage. You can check it out better HERE ...even buy yourself one :)