PHOTOGRAPHY AND TEXT BY DEREK CLARK

I kinda see holidays as more of a personal assignment. A time to concentrate on photography and shoot pictures for me. We are there as a family and we do things for the kids, but I’m lucky that I get a good amount of me time too. One way I do this is by getting up at 6am and hitting the streets with my camera(s), catching the city or town coming alive on a typical working day. I love the subtle differences from one country to the next. New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong, they’re all the same in some way, but different in so many ways of course.

Music plays a huge part in any sort of travelling for me. I’m old enough to remember the life changing invention of the Sony Walkman many years ago, a device that changed travel and music forever. Even at that young age, I was aware of how big a deal it was and happy to be alive at that point in time.
I don’t take my iPhone and bluetooth EarPods any less for granted though, even if a mobile phone is something most of us in the western world own. Pop in the tiny headphones hit play and my world is transformed. It literally is the soundtrack to my life. And what better to listen to but some actual movie soundtracks by composers like Hans Zimmer (Inception, The Dark Knight …etc) or Angelo Milli (Seven Pounds). Or it might be some real daydreaming stuff from the likes of Ryuichi Sakamoto (check out Async or 1996) or violinist Daniel Hope (check out Spheres). Of course there are days that call for a bit of Snarky Puppy or John Coltrane. Whatever sets the mood to get the desired shots.

As a side project during a trip to Barcelona last year, I shot a few pictures on high speed bursts mode on my X-Pro2 and X100T (actually it was more like 1,500 than a few). I thought it would be a good idea to put them together in a short stop motion film for this piece. This is a very quick edit. To be honest, it’s the second edit as the first one crashed just as I was about to render it in DaVinci Resolve. Note to self - Remember to turn on auto-save when creating a new project.