Re-visiting Travel Photos - (U.K - Part 2 - 2017 - Digital)

Welcome back to another post of 'Re-visiting Travel Photos'. This week we'll be looking at part 2 of photos taken in the U.K. This is yet another bunch of photos taken on the same day just wandering around the main attractions such as Tower Bridge, Big Ben, and Buckingham Palace. It was a big day of walking around and catching transport as all the locations are relatively spread out from each other.

These photos were taken on the 10th of October, 2017.

Now, there are quite a few that don't have original edits, as well as a lot of originals missing that have been edited.

To make it easier to look at, I've put all the photos with original, edited, and re-edited files together, and all others after that.

Let's get into it.

I've noticed that when I take a photo I tend to edit it the same day most of the time. And with these ones here, I did exactly that. I only edit a photo once most of the time and leave it at that. Rarely ever do I go back and re-edit. Most of the time the first edit I do, I put up to social media, which kind of locks me into settling on the one edit I've done.

When you go back to the original photo after some time you see it in a new light. More possibilities present themselves.

It's the same with anything. For example, video editing. My short film 'The Night Hag'. I shot that on April 6th and 7th and started editing it straight away. I was on a tight schedule as I was leaving for my Europe trip at the start of May, giving myself 1 month to edit. I did a lot of pre-production for how I wanted it to turn out so the edit pieced itself together pretty quickly. I practically finished it before leaving but didn't make it public. When I came back to Melbourne in September I went through the edit again and found it wasn't as good as it could be, and that it was actually unfinished. Mistakes revealed themselves after stepping back from the edit. I saw the edit in a new light. New ideas came to me for how I could lay the edit out.

So, in the end, the short film became a whole new piece by the time the re-edit was complete.

The same can be said for photo editing. You do the first edit, leave it for a certain amount of time, from a week to a month (in this case, 3 years) and you'll create something either drastically different or slightly different. It doesn't matter how much change the photo has undergone, you'll find that at least one aspect will undergo change, and to me, I find that interesting.

Since doing all these posts on 're-visiting travel photos' I can see the potential some of these photos have. They don't have to get lost over time. They have more to give in certain cases.

So with that, let's break some original edits.

As you can see I went above and beyond this time around with the orange and teal look. Bleeding out any photo I could for aqua blues, reds and oranges. In some cases it works but for others, not quite as much. I can't lie, it was a unique colour palette. It had style, eye candy, and colour. The images popped and were rich. But they were also unnatural, at times imbalanced, and overkill. They fit the criteria of pop art, which I'm a fan of, but didn't reach quite far enough. The photo style died off before it could reach that level. They needed more brightness and colour variety. Not just strong aqua skies and popping reds.

The reds fit perfectly for London though, being the icon it is for red buses and telephone booths. And bringing out the aqua in the blues works because of the grey weather London is known all too well for.

For the re-edits, I decided to go for more of a bright white, white balance, instead of blue. I was gentle on the blues but did add some tinges to the temperature tone to pick up blue edges on the subjects, as you might be able to see on the glass egg building.

I've been trying to go for the more natural look with photos lately, with the exception of tipping the temperature scale to the warming side for beach photos. For London though, I made it cold and pale.

For these photos, I actually jumped off my 35mm look and tried to go more modern and natural. I put the de-haze up +15 instead of -5, bringing out the clean glass look for certain photos. I upped the saturation by 10-15 and focused on composition. Straightening and centring photos to be more pleasing to look at. This was something a rarely did with editing back in the day. When I did try and do it, I never got it 100% right. Along with straightening of photos, I cleaned the edges and tried to add balance by following the 'rule of thirds' or centring my subject with even lines.

I'll be adding some of these photos to my 'Digital Photography' tab. Check out the photos below and compare them from original, edit, and re-edit, and let me know what you think.

Leave a comment below with your favourite edit and re-edit!

Thanks for reading. Join me next Friday at 12 pm for another blog post. Until then, stay safe.