Today I woke up and decided that this blog needed some attention. I have hid my images behind excuses and distractions and self deprecation. Today is different.
These are some photographs from our road trip trough Croatia in May of 2018.
This was the first time Stu and I had traveled with someone else. We had the pleasure of toting around Croatia with one of our nearest and dearest - miss Gina. How lucky are we to have friends who like us enough to spend ten days driving around with a married couple? We saw the sun rise and set, the bluest waters, the sweetest little fishing boats, the ruins of early societies and the destruction of recent wars. We drove through a small stretch of Bosnia on our way to and from Dubrovnik, which is honestly something this 90’s kid never thought was a possibility. We sailed, we got stranded in a national park, we sunbathed - some of us al natural, we met lovely people, we ate all the food and we drank all the wine. About that last thing… the wine… If you take anything away from this post it should be that, Croatian wine is some kind of magic juice with all the fun effects of alcohol and none of the side-effects. What IS this place?! Looking back it was the perfect type of sunshiney, nostalgic trip that we’ll look back on and smile.
With all that said, I have a few thoughts I’d like to share that help give context to these images and to help any folks that run into mental road blocks from time to time. Although the trip was great, I was struggling creatively on this trip. I felt that every photograph I took looked like shit. The creative juices just weren’t flowing. I photographed a lot but it felt aimless, a lot of what I was shooting lacked intention. I was frustrated that I was in a beautiful place and wasn’t able to convey that through the camera even though everywhere I looked was a view deserving of a frame. I’ve heard this type of thing happens to creative folks from time to time so chances are you know what I’m talking about. After I was done wallowing in my own negativity, I came to the conclusion that my head and my heart were telling me that I needed to be challenged. I’ve always found learning something new (or in this case, re-learning something new) helps work my creative muscle and redirects my energy into something positive and productive. So I decided that I’d give myself an assignment. The assignment was to just photograph color. I made a deal with myself that all I had to do was look for color - totally doable. This was a stripped-down, back-to-basics, assignment borrowed from photo-101. It challenged my way of seeing because I wasn’t looking for an entire scene, just one element, it simplified things so that I could reset. Croatia is a wildly colorful place so it didn’t take long for the photo funk to clear. Looking back every frame wasn’t shit and I shouldn’t have been so hard on myself but I figured it out and I’m happy to share the outcome with you. ❤️
Enjoy!
