Chillin’

I am currently at T-15 days and almost all preparations for my travel are completed. Hotels and other accommodations are booked and vouchers for rail passes, SIM cards, etc. are all packed up. There is still one gap left in my schedule for 2 days in Japan but I decided to make that decision once I am there and just wing it. Super excited. This will be a very long summer but I have so many things lined up that I it will probably create so much momentum to keep me going until the summer the year after. 

With all that in mind, I am going through a phase of extreme decompression right now to generate and store some energy. Sleep a lot, chill a lot, long walks, lots of reading, long lunches, long dinners, lots of photography: life in slow motion. Lots of good things come from deliberately slowing down. 

I am still shooting mostly black-and-white those days. Color detox. It is like slowing down – changes the perspective on things. You are looking for contrasts and compatible textures when shooting black-and-white. Very different from color, where contrast plays another role altogether..

Black-and-white also changes the story telling aspect of photography. As it is already a pretty aggressive abstraction of how we usually see, it requires a more active story telling approach. 

I also started to curate my Instagram account more actively as mentioned already last time. It is a great tool to connect to other photographers, both in terms of seeking inspiration as well as to hang out when traveling. One thing about Instagram puzzles me though. While I get the whole mobile platform thing, I don’t really get why you cannot get a more screen-filling view for non-square shots (e.g., 3:2) by rotating your phone. More and more photos seem to be non-square on Instagram (which is a good thing as squares can be quite limiting for certain compositions) and currently you are losing out a lot on the available screen space due to the aspect ratio mismatch. 

So much for now—TSJ.

Follow me on Instagram: @terencesjones