London Calling

London has been the first destination during our recent strictly photographic trip to Europe. There is no question that many people travel to numerous destinations around the world and most of them has a sort of camera with them. It could be an iPhone, a small point-and-shoot or a large SLR. It doesn’t really matter. What does matter is a mindset you are travelling with.

Most people combine family vacations or business, or even some sort of tourist agenda, into the trip. It is rarely a purely photographic escapade. Obviously, when you travel with your family the agenda is set, often by appropriate authorities J

As far as I’m concerned, in order to reach a certain level of visual attentiveness, I need to go deep into my self-seeing. If there are no conversations, no agendas, no detailed plans, no goals and no time constrains, my seeing usually thrives and is not afraid to go into new places. On the other hand, tight schedules, business dealings, family meetings is something I dearly enjoy but not when parallel with my photography.

For those of you interested in going deeper into this subject, we just started a new series “A mindset of a travelling photographer” on our Simplicity-In-Seeing platform.    

Fortunately, the recent trip to London was all about photography. Our first destination was funky and historic Brick Lane, where we focused on environmental portraiture. Then, we headed to an ultra-modern SOHO district for a different sort of visual experience. We also visited a few more areas such as Barbican and Canary Wharf but the bulk of our imagery comes from SOHO district.

As we were going through our entire imagery shot in London, we found a surprisingly high share of strong imagery. Indeed, some we found very appealing but rather cliché, hence in most cases we got rid of such images straight away. There is only one criterion that guides me when reviewing our travel work: we must feel strongly about the images we decided to share with you. In fact, when teaching workshops we always urge our students to avoid the “LIKE” mentality.

Kasia and I had a discussion how to share such a broad, and often different, sort of a visual diary. After a heated but very productive discussion we finally decided to split the work along the themes. We thought that this way of presentation will provide our viewers with some contextual experience and with a sufficient mystery imbedded in each individual image to leave each individual viewer guessing, wandering and finding their own IT in them.

We decided to start with a modest “London Calling” theme. In our next blog posts we will go into darker and slightly deeper visuals with a series “Metropolis.”  

All imagery taken with the X100F.

 

For general updates, I was recently a guest on a photographic podcast http://shuttertimewithsidandmac.com where I had a privilege to discuss all sorts of fascinating topics with my gracious hosts. Make sure to check it out.

 

Also, in the latest issue of the Fujilove Magazine you will find my article “Embracing Critiques – the fastest way to improve your seeing.” For some, a rather controversial topic, for me, an essential element of the development of every committed photographer. Let me know what you think. To those of you who are going to send me their feedback and/or their words of support: Thank you in advance! A separate post about this issue is in preparation.

 

Furthermore, if you are not a subscriber of FujiLove Magazine just yet, make sure to correct this blunder of yours as soon as possible. Tomasz and his team is putting a really great content every month, which goes much deeper than usual, read-it-quick snippets of information available on so many websites. If you are serious about photography, I highly recommend you to subscribe.

Let me leave you with a trailer of our upcoming movie from London. Hope you will enjoy it. 

 

 

 

 

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