This image popped up in my apple memories feed the other day (august 6th, 2016).
It’s fun to look back at photos from previous years and see how my style has evolved over time. It’s a lot like looking at old journal entries and seeing how you used to think. You see things much differently as time goes on.
But you also see what endures, and that’s what I see here. This image is the darkest of the images I shot on that day, and now looking back on it is my favorite - an indication of my move toward more under-exposed photos and more appreciation of shadow.
For comparison, here’s another photo from earlier that same day:
Granted, I was intentionally going for a more summery vibe to match this beach, seafood-shack style restaurant, but you can see a massive difference in tone between these. This represents my earlier imagery, where I leaned often on bright, over exposed imagery - and I’m not saying there isn’t a place for that sort of thing.
But as I’ve watched the evolution of other photographers beyond myself, I’ve seen a similar trend - the longer we’re at it the more we tend toward more natural looking, softer, lightly-laminated images. Or maybe that’s just what I see because that’s what I’m currently attuned to.
I hope you’re enjoying the journey as much as I am.
Video Fun:
Here’s another memory from that same time period. It was around this time that Instagram rolled out the “stories” feature, and I was among the first people to upload DSLR footage to instagram, which was blowing peoples minds left and right. I remember playing around with a lot of rack focus and copious use of the warp stabilizer in premiere to fix my super unsteady footage.
I tired to find the video I made here, where I was rack focusing on this beer, but my video archive in the photos app only goes back to August 15th, 2016. Here’s a good example from back then:
I later wrote a blog post about how to add said footage to instagram, and to this day it’s still the most popular post on this blog.
Here’s an unrelated fun fact - that first image is at Hungry Ghost, a coffee shop on Fulton Street in Fort Greene. My brother, Dustin, currently works there as a barista, three years after I took this photo.