Just 45 minutes on a cold winter night in a non-descript neighborhood. No goals, themes or assignments, just me, my camera and some observations.

I DON’T GET AROUND MUCH THESE DAYS

Since the pandemic hit, I combine my photography business with a part-time “normal” job working from home. It’s great, it offers some financial security in these challenging times. And although the other job takes up time, it gives me the freedom to focus on the kind of photography work I really want to do. The downside is that I don’t get around very often. Although this place isn’t anything special, this walk reminded me to take every opportunity to shoot a bit in a different environment.

JUST START SHOOTING, THE PICTURES WILL FOLLOW … OR NOT

The first five minutes of my walk, I was like: “There’s absolutely nothing to see here”. But after nearly 20 years as a photographer, I’ve learned to ignore that sentiment and push through. I’m convinced that there’s a good picture to be made anywhere, anytime. I’m not saying that I’ll find that picture. But that’s fine as long as I look for it.

I’m slowly starting to accept the fact that I don’t have to come home with a great picture every time. In fact I’m learning that it’s very likely that I won’t come home with a picture that I still want to look at next year. That acceptation has given me a very powerful sense of calm. It’s not an excuse to get lazy but it’s no longer something that drives me crazy every single day.

CAPTURE ONE OR LIGHTROOM?

I’ve been using both Lightroom and Capure One for a couple of years now. For portraits and commercial work I usually turn to C1 because it’s more subtle and I simply get more out of my files. I find Lightroom to be faster and the Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem is handy. I usually edit in Lightroom Mobile on my iPad. I can finetune the edits on my computer if necessary and I can quickly share pictures on social media from LR on my phone. That has made Lightroom my default editing software for my “life” pictures.

Lately I’ve been considering to do everything in Capture One. Yes, it’s a bit slower (probably because I tend to work a little harder on every image in C1) and I’ll miss the LR cloud options. But I feel like I can express myself better with Capture One. I’m going to give it a go for a while and process everything in C1 and hopefully learn the software a bit better. I still struggle a bit with Capture One sometimes. But I know how powerful it is when I look at what some other photographers do with it. For these pictures I used some styles (styles are basically presets in C1) from my friend Patrick LaRoque as my starting point. Patrick is the mood-master and I’m trying to reverse-engineer his settings to understand his creative decisions. By the way, if you want to dig deeper into photography, check out Pat’s 1EYE SOCIETY.

SLOW & SIMPLE

All the images in this post were shot with the X-Pro3 and the XF33mm F1.4. You’ve seen a lot of images with this combo already and if you stick around, you’ll see way more. In order to simplify things, I made the decision to go for a 50mm equivalent lens as my goto solution. I’ll be using other lenses too but only if I have to. This decision has given me a surprising feeling of clarity for some kind of reason. But I will write much more about that later.

That’s it, for now. Let me know what you think!