I live in an extraordinary place. And so do you

I normally post editing techniques and ideas on Life after Photoshop, but this is slightly different. It’s about where we live and how we see it – or even IF we see it. The fashion in photography is to chase around the world looking for ever more spectacular subjects, sights and experiences. Now we take photographs for audiences and algorithms, not ourselves, and that’s our loss.

I’ve been going through my old mono negatives, shot in my youth and, as I can now see, focused intently on my surroundings, the streets and scenery of the town where I lived. I still live there. My early photography was repetitive, perhaps obsessive, but occasionally it also captured the strangeness, drama and the beauty of everyday surroundings seen with different eyes.

Those were the early days. Later, photography became my career. I got to travel and shoot a much wider range of subjects. My home town could not compete with Venice or Las Vegas, Pisa or Paris, so I stopped bothering with it. I think I also stopped looking for depth and meaning and strangeness in the ordinary.

But, looking back through my old photos, I see I had something. All of the places I’ve been to since those days are amazing, but so is the place I live in, in a different way. I made this video to try to explain it.

I took the pictures in the video on a Sony mirrorless camera but with the same approach I used in my early black and white days.

1. I used the camera’s black and white picture style, not just to help previsualize the result but to commit to how the pictures should look right from the start.
2. I shot in manual mode. I checked the exposure at the start of the shoot and stuck to it throughout. Risky? Maybe, but it gave the images a consistency of exposure and tone that I really like.
3. I used a prime lens to keep things simple. It’s tempting to keep as many options open as possible, but often it’s making actual decisions that’s difficult.
4. I used a single preset in Lightroom to maintain a consistency of appearance across the series. It just adds a little grain and contrast for a more film-like effect.
5. I edited the camera JPEGs not the raw files. Shocking, I know! But the exposures were good, and the shots relied on light and shade, not highlight and shadow recovery.

I’ve been trying to recreate the approach I had in my youth. It was naive, perhaps, but it also yielded pictures I can still enjoy today. Most of all, I’ve learned (or re-learned) that the place where I live is pretty extraordinary after all if I see it in a new way – and I think maybe that might apply to all of us.