Circles of Life

One good thing that has come out of the pandemic is having had more than enough spare time on my hands to go through all my personal work and finally organise the thousands of images into a master catalogue. I can’t say I enjoyed the endless hours, months, sifting through old files, adding all those keywords to the selected images, importing them into the catalogue, but at least I am wiser now and will never allow that level of chaos to occur again. And, for those who are interested, the software I chose to manage my library is Capture One.

I’m not going to champion C1 over other softwares, they all have their pluses and minuses. Suffice to say, it’s a software I’ve used for the majority of my professional life, I’ve always loved their processing engine, and I appreciate the development that has gone into making it the tool that it is today. Now that I’m not shooting fashion and advertising images, I find that I’m no longer having to create a single image from multiple elements and can usually achieve the desired result entirely from within C1. Using multiple masks and layers, much like I would have done previously in Photoshop, all the adjustments are in place prior to the processing of the raw file. Occasionally, I have to revert to other means but generally it holds true for the majority of my personal work.

Another good thing with the time away is that it has allowed me to reacquaint myself with some of my earlier material, which is why you will be seeing images like this one, taken in 2014. I’ve titled it Circles of Life, what with all the circular elements of the egg yolks, the large measuring cup and the drain, where we’ll all disappear down one day! In the meantime, the eggs may get scrambled, made into a fine omelette, used for baking,… who knows, but hopefully we’ll enjoy the finding out.

It’s shot on the Fujifilm X100S, my first proper digital point and shoot camera, with a fixed 35mm equivalent lens. One of the side effects of being a commercial photographer for hire, certainly for me anyway, was that I ended up not picking up a camera when I wasn’t working. I suppose there are several reasons for this, such as success and the time restraints that occur when you want to be present in raising a young family. What I can say is that owning the X100S rekindled my joy in carrying a camera with me at all times, snapping merrily away as I went about my day-to-day.

So, without further ado, here’s the start of looking forward, as I look back, in that circular kind of way…