Re-visitng old photos: France 2010

In the summer of 2010 we took a family trip to France. Our family of four plus my mother spent a week in Paris, a week down south in the Perigord region and then a third week in Brittany. It was a spectacular trip. The weather was great. The scenery and architecture was, as always, beautiful. The new villages were exciting to see and even the city of Paris, which I had been to several times before, was great to explore through the camera lens.

When we returned I processed the images I had made, spending more time on the ones I deemed the best and quickly processing others that I felt were, at best, good holiday snaps. These images were all put together in a book. I was pretty happy with some of the images I had brought home and a little disappointed with others. This is something that I have become accustomed to with photographing on family holidays. These excursions are not the same as doing a photography trip. Granted, my family is very accommodating with my need to stop and photograph all the time. That trip they probably spent a good few hours all together waiting for me at various locals, but it is not the same as doing a trip on your own where you can stop and spend as much time as you want at any one spot to work the shot. C’est la vie! the french would say, and I’m OK with that as it was a family holiday after all. It just means that often I won’t have the perfect light for the particular shot, or the chance to find the perfect angle

Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I was sitting at my computer one day backing up images and decided to review the images from those three weeks in France and to see what I could find in them when looking at them with new eyes, new skills and new tools. My first run through was to select images that I wanted to convert to Black & White. The second run through was to select images that I wanted to play with the colours and to add textures to. At first I had way more images that I wanted to convert to black & white, but as I began to work on images in colour, playing with the saturation levels and adding textures, I decided I preferred these images to the B&W conversions I had done.

In the whole process I found the images from Paris lent themselves to black and white conversions better than those I took in the other regions of France. I think it may have had something to do with the light/weather  I was photographing in and the colours of the stone used in the architecture.

While my “beginnings” in photography were in the black and white darkroom, I feel myself drawn to the textured and desaturated images as much as to the black and whites. Perhaps it is the sudo-antique feel to them. I’m not sure.