Comfort in Gloom, Finding a medium.
A dark rainy day is my happy place - how do I share the feeling?
Let’s talk about:
Bah, Instagram / Social Media
Recommended Background Music
Writing, Newsletter, Email
Rainy Weather, Gloom, Cyberpunk Ambience
Newfound Fujifilm Freedom
Bah, Instagram / Social Media
I’ve been thinking a lot about how best to present my images, and if Instagram is even the place for it. I’ve seriously considered not even using it anymore to see how it might improve my mental state - and I’m almost certain there would be a marked improvement.
I’ve long felt that using IG was a requirement of getting my photos out in the world, because “everyone uses it”, but is that even true? Maybe it’s just an illusion. And even if everyone uses it, does that mean it’s right for me, my work, or what I want to accomplish?
I know I really dislike the distraction of getting on there and getting sucked into every trick in the book they use to keep me on there. I hate it. I just want to share some photos and get back to my life.
But for now, I’m still interested in finding new ways to share, and I haven’t put that much effort into using these ‘Reels’ (short form video on Instagram, if you’re not familiar. Up to 1min 30 seconds), so to still feels too soon to give up. I could, and would like to, do more long form video. I think it’s a much better fit for slow, considered digestion. Youtube is one of my favorite places on the internet, and I’d like to be contributing there more than just consuming, and I think people could get to know me and my work there better than any social media app.
Recommended Background Music
By the way, here’s some recommended background music while you read the rest of this. It’s what I’m listening to you right now as I write. I think you might need YouTube Premium for it to play in the background on mobile, which is telling about how I experience the world; and how much I use Youtube. I wonder, if you press play on it and keep scrolling, will that work? Problem could be solved right there. (I just tested this. No go on email, but it does work if you’re reading in the Substack app)
Also, I’ve been following this guy for several years, and listen to this stuff all the time when I’m writing and photo editing. Really gets me in the zone. You can obviously see the overlap between my image aesthetic and this kind of audio journey.
Writing and Email Lists
Right here in the newsletter is also an excellent place. But I doubt anyone’s reading all the way to the bottom, and they might be opening it on their phone. But, maybe you’re a person that likes to check and read your emails, or you’re a Substack user looking at it there, but you might not be someone to sit back on the couch and put on a Youtube video. So, there’s something different for everyone, everywhere. But how much do I want to be so fragmented? Not at all, honestly.
I do really enjoy writing, so I certainly feel that continuing to this is helpful - and every video I make, I can just share here in addition to wherever else it lives. As I’m putting this together right now, I am very satisfied with how the images are presenting, and how it’s flowing. Just as good, or maybe even better than the video. I was once told “it all starts with writing” and I really do believe it. Kinda silly that I ever got distracted from it. Shoulda been sending newsletters my entire life.
But like everything else I do, it comes in waves.
For this rainy drive, I felt some quick pacing between displaying the images lets them tell a sequential story, so that no single shot has to stand on its own as much - and that displaying them in video lets me decide how long the viewer spends looking at each one of them. So you’re not swiping through them at lightning speed, but you’ve got a kind of guide to say “let’s sit back and look at this a moment” and maybe it jumps to the next one just before you’re done, maybe leaving you wanting just a tiny bit more. If that works, maybe you’ll want to watch it again to get back to that one shot. Maybe one shot is more important than another.
Editing it together in Instagram has a nice hand feel to it, but it does trap it on this platform, and I’d like to put it elsewhere as well, which means I’ll need to edit it again on a dedicated editor, or deal with the watermark, which ruins the aesthetic, as you can see above.
Rainy Weather, Gloom, Cyberpunk Ambience
Anyway, I absolutely love rainy dark weather like this, and I think it says a lot about me, maybe my history of playing video games, getting into the cyberpunk genre, and maybe some of it is owed to being born in Oregon and spending my most formative years in the misty forest. It’s totally intertwined, I guess.
I honestly don’t even remember how I got into this sort of dark, gloomy cyberpunk aesthetic. Just growing up when I did and enjoying The Matrix, Blade Runner, 5th Element, and other Sci Fi shows just kinda fed into it. Right time and place for it? The video game Cyberpunk 2077 is currently the top of my chart for best game I’ve ever played.
All that to say, taking images like this comes very naturally to me, and sitting in the passenger seat with my camera I entered a flow state of creating these images. A lot of them have a sort of cinematic feel I’ve been wanting to bring forward in my imagery, so I’m very happy with them. I hope some of them look like they’re scenes straight out of a movie.
Newfound Fujifilm Freedom
Every image here is straight out of camera, with zero time spent in Lightroom (except for a few images where I manipulated road signs to obscure locations, and my wife’s phone screen for privacy). This has long been a dream of mine, because the extra step of doing post-production on my images frequently means I never get around to them, and they lanquish on forgotten disk storage.
I absolutely love this, and I love this camera. It’s changed my life, my art, my zeal and joy for the craft. I’m much more excited to shoot and share my images thanks to this simplified workflow.
I have a few custom film emulations I set up based on Fuji X Weekly’s recipes:
McCurry Kodachrome (Half the shots were this)
Ektar 100 (only one shot)
And the rest were my base preset of Fujifilm Velvia.
On the subject of workflow, I transfer the images (as high efficienty image format, HEIF, as you see above) directly to my phone from the camera via the Fuji X App. Then they live in my apple Photos film roll. From there they go straight into production, like the Instagram reel from earlier, posting on IG / Stories and for most of the shots here, I dragged them directly from the desktop Photos app right into the Substack editor, which outputs a compressed version fit for web viewing.
But, for three of the darkest shots, it clipped the blacks, which I had to go back and export better versions. A very minor inconvenience. The process did, however, start to bog down the Photos app, and by the end it crashed several times. So, not the most ideal workflow - but I spent very little time in file management, and absolutely none in Lightroom, which I’m very thrilled with.
By lowering the barriers and complexity that got in the way, I can share more art, and isn’t that what it’s all about?