What do you do with your holiday photographs?

Like most people, I take a digital camera on my holidays. I really enjoy selecting things to photograph and composing the shots  – it’s a part of the holiday. On our recent month-long trip to Australia & New Zealand, I took almost 1100 photos.

While on holiday, I try to do some editing as I go along, looking at the day’s pictures in the evening and deleting the obvious duplicates or failures. On our recent trip, I found this continual editing difficult because we were doing so much and moving so often. At home, I was astonished at how many near-identical shots I had of Uluru at sunset and sunrise.

Once the holiday is over, I upload all the photographs onto my computer. When I have time, I then copy a selection onto my web site and integrate them into my narrative of the holiday.  For our recent holiday, so far I’ve only put eight pictures on my web site – all of them in fact copies of photos taken of us doing special things. You can check out the page here.

But I also do something extra with my holiday photographs – something I find few people do these days. I have them printed out. Then I put around 80% of them in albums. I like to think that this makes the pictures more accessible to family and friends and that, in the future, my descendants will find it easier to look at hard copies.

But, of course, making up albums takes a lot of time and this weekend I have only just begun the process for our latest holiday.


2 Comments

  • Nadine Wiseman

    Hello Roger

    I deliberately try not to take many photos- I find it distracts me from enjoying the experience. In fact, the old tourist activity of sketching draws one’s attention to the scene much more effectively. Even film-photography was better, as one had to weigh up the cost of the film. Now at a point of interest one is surrounded by people looking at their phones or camera screens instead of using their eyes to look at the beauty in front of them.

    It’s nice to have a few shots – usually of us in the scene – to email home and then print out for a small album.

    So as you can guess I’m a terrible audience of other people’s travel photos. Unless they have the people in (or animals), my attention wanders. And I can’t abide being dragged through an un-edited holiday photo collection, of, as you say, zillions of near-identical shots of scenery.

    But I’ll check out your website – at speed!!

  • Roger Darlington

    I understand your point, Nadine.

    On our month-long trip, I took almost 1,100 photos and I will only mount around 80% but, on the New Zealand portion of the holiday, there was a guy who took 2,500 pictures just in NZ (it turned out he was a retired photographer and intended to edit all of them through Photoshop!).

    I think it’s a question of balance. I like to take photographs – it makes me look at things more sharply – but one does need to allow time to enjoy the moment too.

 




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