Learning to not ignore your holiday snapshots is something that I would recommend, and I’ll get to the why shortly. But first a wee recap on where I am currently with my photography.
I have spent the best part of the last four months at home after being semi-immobilised by a debilitating and painful hip injury brought on by a fall and which, as it turns out, requires a full hip replacement further down the track.
Unfortunately being immobilised has meant that I have had to place my day to day photographic activities, as well as a long planned project on film emulation, on the back-burner until I am able to get out and about freely to take photographs for said project.
All is not doom and gloom though as I have had plenty of time to troll through my photo archives looking for new/old material to maintain this photoblog, as well as watching and absorbing photography videos on YouTube.
I haven’t been watching “how to” videos, but have concentrated on inspirational, motivational, thought provoking subject matter. I have found some really useful stuff from photographers like Rick Bebbington, Alex Armitage, Alex Kilbee and more. I know that these guys, and many of the others with YouTube channels, won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but what I like about these three photographers in particular is that they don’t adopt an air of superiority in their videos. They don’t talk down to you, and don’t have an “I’m better than you” attitude.
Don’t Ignore Your Holiday Snapshots
It was actually one of the YouTube videos I watched that helped me with the basis for this story. I don’t remember exactly who the YouTuber was, but he talked about personal photographic style and how looking through old photos could help with forming your own style, or help you recognise your own style…or at least something along those lines.
If you are like me you’ll have thousands of photographs from years gone by sitting “in storage”, badly sorted, not properly keyword, not even processed…and not very often looked at.
So away I went digging…
I found a folder deep in my photo archives labelled “Fiji-2016“. In there, in a sub-folder, was a collection of holiday snapshots from Fiji, all JPEGs, taken with a compact Fujifilm XF-1. I had forgotten that I had once had that camera, but I do remember it was a cracking wee carry anywhere camera and the only reason I got rid of it was because of a consistently annoying “lens error” message!
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Probably the only time I looked at the photos in that particular folder was when I copied them from the SD-card. The majority of the photos are most likely never going to see the light of day publicly, as they really are just holiday snapshots, but after reviewing them (225 in all…), I chose a few and set about sprucing them up a bit using Photolab 8 with the DxO Film Pack add-on.
I say sprucing them up a bit because to my eye, the Fujifilm colours were way too bright – almost over the top. So maybe I should have said sprucing them down a bit? Although having said that after nine years I can’t remember what picture settings the XF-1 was set to, nor can I truly recall the real colours of Fiji.
Following some of the advice I picked up in my video-watching-marathons I tossed out some of my processing habits and tried to embrace a new approach.
I consciously told myself to NOT level horizons or the roofs of buildings, and used differing aspect ratios and cropping to try to present the images to best advantage.
In most of these photographs large swathes of unnecessary foreground and background were removed, thus bringing the important parts of the images back into prominence.
I used Film Pack to dial back the colours, and even now I find them perhaps on the verge of being too vibrant.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy my revamped holiday snapshots…
The Korolevu Beach Hotel was one of the Coral Coast’s first resorts, and one that kicked off Fiji’s mass tourism industry, but it was abandoned after a major hurricane in the ’80s disrupted the power infrastructure which wasn’t restored for a year so the resort couldn’t accommodate guests and closed.
There was also a small airport back in the day to serve the Korolevu area. The small shopping centre is still open.
Suva is the capital and most populous city of Fiji. Located on the eastern side of Viti Levu, Suva’s urban population is around 185,000 – enough to make it a bright vibrant city.
Street photography- Suva, 2016…
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