Currently I am going through a bit of a creative funk.  When it comes to taking photos, I have been so uninspired that even when I do make a point of going out to take photos, it is a bit like…meh! Granted for the past two weeks the kids have been on school holidays and having a six year old in the house means I am the chief entertainer. That is a full time job. So time to myself has been limited.  School has just started back so I am looking forward to my funk fading away as I get out more with my camera.

My work flow usually sees me out taking street shots and then editing and publishing those images within a couple of days.  Rarely have I actually left images in the camera to wait until I have more or get around to editing eventually. As a result, when importing  and editing the images, the memory of taking them, where I was and what I was thinking  is still fresh in my mind. Every now and then I would scroll through my catalogue of images searching for a particular example of something and would happen upon an image or group of images from a time I may have forgotten.  That is always nice.

With my upcoming trip to Tokyo now less than four months away, I have started doing more research on places I want to go and things I want to see.  Also, and more importantly, areas where I can do street photography. With my interest in Tokyo fresh I decided to take a look through my catalogue of the images I took when I was there in 2015.  It was a mix of street photography, architecture, landscape and touristy stuff. But I was only looking at the images I actually chose to edit and eventually publish.  And these had been edited very close to my return home.  And, they are only around 500 of the 3,500 images I took.

So I located all of the RAW file images on my storage drive and started to look through them.  Perhaps because almost two years had passed since that trip, or perhaps because I was looking at the images with the eyes of a man needing creative inspiration, or perhaps because as a street photographer I have matured and grown. Probably all of those things actually.  And probably also because I was getting excited about my upcoming trip.  That is a lot of probablies. But I was coming across images that, at the time didn’t make the cut, but now needed some further attention.  I needed to make a B-Side mix of images from this collection.

I looked through every one of those 3,500 images and pulled out the ones I though were deserving of a second chance.  As it turned out I chose around 200 images.  Images that I had never edited or published before.  Images that I had never shown anyone. I set to work.  With this group of images I decided to keep them all in colour and in the editing process in Lightroom I applied a preset called Organik to each image.  Then my usual workflow of cropping and playing with the light was employed.

As it turns out I am really quite happy with the outcome.  And I took these photos for me and not for any other purpose so I think that is important. Undertaking this little exercise has done a number of things.  It has pulled me out of my current mood a little which in turn has inspired me to get out and shoot some more street images this week. It has taught me that it is not necessarily the best practice to get to work editing my images as soon as I return from a shoot.  It has made me wonder if there are any other groups of images that I initially thought were unworkable but deserve to make the next B-Side mix. Happy shooting.