Archiving

Over the past couple of weeks I have been busy going through old photographs from travels long since finished and uploading the to my flickrpage.

Derrynane, Co. Kerry, Ireland, July 2013

Derrynane, Co. Kerry, Ireland, July 2013

It started accidentally, with me uploading a huge number of images from my summer in Ireland, mostly from Kerry on the south west coast. After this, I realised that I still had at least a memory card or two worth of photographs from our most recent visit to Thailand, in February of 2012, and Malaysia in July of the same year. While I’d uploaded some of my photos from Malaysia, I think the Internet still deserved a few more.

Further inspiration for uploading more photographs came when a package with around 250 photographs from our Honeymoon to Turkey in 2008 arrived on the doorstep. I had finally taken the initiative to put together a photo album from that time, and it only took something like five and a half years.

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Hierapolis, Turkey, July 2008

Now this really was an amazing collection of photographs, not just of the memories myself and Herself shared, but also of a very spectacular and scenic country, one which we’d both like to return to again in the future. I think I was quite selective in the photographs I chose to develop in that they reflected our experience together and the memories we’d like to look back in in the future. That being said, that I left out so many due to this is a perfectly good reason to trawl through the folders again and share some of these images here.

It’s interesting to watch how my style and quality of photograph has developed. With travel photography, there’s always the necessity to capture as much of the scene or the action as possible, and to present a sense of how it actually feels to be there. I think that as I’ve taken more and more photos, both every-day and travelling shots, I’ve become more capable of doing this. Of course most of my early shots are simple point and shoot efforts, regardless of the quality of the camera (back then mostly a Sony DSC-H5, which I still have back in Ireland), I still had to do my best to take as good a shot as possible, a skill which I kind of had to learn myself.  With time I spent more and more effort composing the photo, taking time to frame it, and to snap at the right time. With my DSLR now I am starting to see how this is even more important than ever, considering I know so little about light, shutter speed, aperture, and eveythign else bar pushing that little shiny button on the top.

Before I begin to share photographs here on mass, I should add that I’ve just uploaded a small set of photographs from a brief stopover in Hong Kong we made on the way to Seoul from Dublin in the same year. I am also beginning to dig into other folders saved on my hard drive and on CDs of visits to places like China, Japan, more Thailand and Malaysia, France, the UK where myself and Herself lived for a year after getting married, Ireland, and of course Korea. It’s is an exciting project ahead for myself.

Hong Kong and the Star Ferry, May 2008

Hong Kong and the Star Ferry, May 2008

When I think back over the countries I’ve visited I don’t think I’m that well travelled (I base this assumption on the amount of countries I still want to visit), but when I look back at the many different experiences and locations I’ve been to I can be proud of myself in this regard. I still know that I have many journeys ahead of me, and along this way I plan to have my camera, Herself, and for the foreseeable future, +1.

To view the sets on my flickr page, including recent uploads from Thailand, Malaysia, and Hong Kong, please click on this link.