New Photography Page is Up!

I’m excited to tell you the galleries are mostly updated on the Photography page. Nepal and India are the most recent ones up there, and if you have explored this page previously, those are not new. However, Venice, Croatia, Basque Country, London and more have all been posted.

Before we started the trip I bought a FujiFilm X100F to be my trusty sidekick for the year. Small and simple, I thought it would be perfect in a purist sort of sense. Fixed lens, few choices, but amazing hardware and chips within. When you carry a camera every day you simply increase the chances you’ll take a picture. I loved my Canon 7D, but the kit is large and heavy and I never carried it much. I lugged it around Cambodia and Vietnam in 2013, but I would often leave it behind. Either in the hotel room or back in the states entirely like when we went to Myanmar. I thought the X100F would be a great compromise.

Good or bad, that little Fuji brought back to life a love for photography I haven’t felt since high school. By the time we got to London I was already shopping for other models from Fuji that could still make me feel unnoticed and not hinder my willingness to carry every day. I settled on the new X-Pro2. This camera had a range of lenses to choose from, and I got two. The number of situations I’m equipped to shoot went up drastically. With my little fixed-lens X100F there were many times it simply wasn’t the right focal length for what I was trying to capture.

The morning I made the trade, I also took a street photography workshop in London. 500 photos that day, the two batteries I had were dead by the end of it. The gents putting the workshop on were kind to extend into the night for some additional challenge and lessons in the dark, but my camera was dead and I was already late for dinner. The trade has enabled me to take long sky exposures in Nepal, reach in tightly for portraits and people, and really scale up both the breadth and depth of what I can capture. This is also why the London gallery is overflowing.

The galleries don’t function precisely how I’d like them to. It would be nice if the captions I’ve written were visible, and if a few extra options were removed to save some confusion I think is inevitable. But if once in a gallery, you click the picture itself it will open in whats called a lightbox. In the bottom left corner, you will see the photo filename, which may help place the photo a little for you. Then use the arrows or your arrow keeys to cycle through the photos. That would be my recommendation.

I invite feedback on these pictures. I’ve loved shooting them, but another challenge I’ve taken on is learning more about post-processing. In high school, I used the darkroom. Now it is all software and I’m trying to learn all the secrets of Adobe Lightroom. I’ve played with different scenarios, presets, treatments, and so on for certain looks. Sometimes I wonder if I’m working the post-processing too much, other times I really love the additional feeling it gives the picture.

Do you see any that make you feel one way or the other?

Published
Categorized as Travel

By Daniel Hatke

The author was born and raised in Indiana. After graduating from Purdue University he worked in the asset management industry in New York City. He holds an MBA from Columbia Business School with concentrations in finance and entrepreneurship. Currently, he is fueling his curiosities through taking time off for extended travel and experiences in Europe and Asia, as chronicled here.