As I do every two years or so since starting to share my life with Eiko, I am about to depart for Japan, this time to take some wedding shots with her family and of course, have a little look around and explore unfamiliar places with a camera. And as I have done on the last two occasions before departing, I am thinking, almost stressing, about how I will take phots, knowing that I will take many, many photos, and not wanting to do it in the wrong way. My options this time around, after six months of “game development,” are a little limited.
The first time I went in 2015, I took with me the great LUMIX gx7, and shot jpeg, editing periodically with the photos app on an iPad Air 2. This worked, but was quite involved with large file sizes, long wifi transfers, and the need to select images carefully. I had only recently got into photography and had been using Lightroom excessively, and after Japan I wrote about how the Photos app was helping me enjoy photography again my putting more emphasis on shooting rather than editing. I was still editing every shot, but was fussing much less, and trying to take photographs that wouldn’t need as much editing in the first place.
The second time, in 2017, I took with me and iPhone 8 and was quite pleased with how easy it made everything. Parsing shots through VSCO right on the phone, I was glad to exchange some of the photographic process and quality for convenience. The shots, by the way, were nice, and I think 2017s phones took better photos than the generation after, perhaps…
