Edits

Sitting in front of a laptop for several hours trawling through thousands of photos to try and whittle the number down to a manageable collection of pictures from an event or season that tell a coherent story is not always as fun as it might sound.

I know this because I have experienced it many times and especially over the last week. Having taken 12 days out (mentioned post before last)to go into rural south Africa and taken aprox 1,200 photos of ALOT of African kids I felt a little photoed-out so when this was immediately followed up by a trip to a national park (last blog post) where I was also official photographer for the group - (this basically means that you are obliged to take photos of anything that is even remotely interesting because if you come away from a national park without photos then your trip there was wasted) meaning that I racked up another 800 photos in a single day only 3 days after getting back from the photo-thon that was rural.

So after filtering through 2000 photos to produce around 20 that can be used for blogging and facebook purposes I was tired of photography. This happens sometimes and it is largely because I am dealing with photos that I have no particular interest in - why do I take said pictures in the first place? Because being the 'photography guy' people inevitably (and actually multiple times a day) will ask me for my photos. In principle I have no problem with this. I love to use my ability, equipment and time to bless other people with photos  the problem arises with quality. My definition of a useable picture is very different from that of most people. They would prefer quantity over quality and therefore I end up processing lots of frankly lame pictures.

So I felt photoed-out and could not be bothered to take any more pictures, I was quite happy to leave my camera in my room and forget about it for a while. So typically the following day a friend asks if I will take some photos of him for his news letter. So I oblige and as I am taking the photos the difference hits me like a wet fish - when the photos have an intended purpose it is so much easier to both take and edit them. My friend also wanted to be shown  what software I used to edit my pictures so I gave him an overview of Adobe Lightroom 3 by editing the pictures of him. This was a joy rather than a chore - actually taking the time to make good photos great and turning them into something that perfectly suits the intended purpose. So now I know how to cure photoed-out-ness, ironically it is to take more photos.

So these are the edits of some more of those 2000 photos that I took in the last 2 weeks - Enjoy!

This is the friend who wanted the profile pictures taken so if you can read Spanish go check him out... http://diegocaceres.org/

Title font used 'Neogrey'