Planned Spontaneity

After almost nine months into a year of travel through Europe and Asia, I’ve found greater clarity when it comes to why I take a photo. There are the photos I take for the purposes of documentation and then there are the photos that I take to capture a specific moment in time, a feeling, a rush of movement or stillness. Some places transcend being captured in a single photo but I try anyway because they are so awe inspiring I want to remember a sliver of the feeling I had when I saw it with my own two eyes. That’s how I felt about the hike I took this summer in the Accursed Mountains of Northern Albania (Bjeshkët e Namuna; also known as the Albanian Alps).

The travel mentality I live by is “planned spontaneity”. I plan the start (e.g. quit my job and buy a oneway plane ticket) and then let the rest unfold spontaneously. This allows me to be open to the unknown. To experiences, people, and places that I didn’t know existed and therefore couldn’t have imagined or planned for ahead of time. It might come as little of a surprise that I found myself on a full day trek in northern Albania that I had first heard about three days earlier from a fellow traveler in Montenegro. Even so, I still wasn’t planning to do the hike because it was six hours and two days out of my way. However, the day before the hike I met another traveler, Zeph, who convinced me at 11:30pm to join him for the hike. This meant waking up the next morning at 6am to catch a van to a ferry to another van that would take us to the guesthouse where we would begin the hike from the following day.

The photos speak for themselves, but boy was I glad I said yes to the hike. Still after nine months of travel and many beautiful countries and hikes, this adventure remains one of the most stunning and memorable. Consider a trip to Albania to hike these mountains. I want to go back and do a full multi-day trek from village to village. When in doubt say “yes”. You never know what adventure may present itself.

Process:

1. Do shit: yes it helps that I’ve been traveling for nine months, but even so, sometimes my favorite photos from a country I visit are from the random walk I took down some side streets in search of a dinner spot.

2. Capture: First impression photos, often times these are the best, they capture the first moment you set eyes on the subject, the moment of initial awe, of inspiration. Other times these first photos act as my exploration as I discover the ultimate angle and framing for the shot I go with. I shoot on my iPhone XS using the Moment Anamorphic lens with their app. It provides a wide, cinematic perspective to my shots that I love when filming, but also in stills.

3. Selection: I do everything on mobile while I’m traveling and besides editing I have the hardest time with this part. I often have a dozen photos that are pretty similar and on the small screen I have a hard time remembering what exactly I was doing in the moment.

4. Crop: I take this as an opportunity to refine my framing before moving into the full edit.

5. Edit: Since I’m editing all on my phone while traveling, I’ve sampled a range of editing apps. My go-to is the PS Express App from Adobe. Adobe’s Lightroom mobile app is also good, but I’ve just been using the PS Express app for longer so am more used to it. I do have some presets that I’ve created that I throw on a photo to see how it looks and then from there I usually have an idea of what’s going to work and what’s not. What colors I want to bring out and what ones I want to dial back. I go into the HSL sliders and make adjustments as well as playing with my shadows and highlights sliders, that’s mainly where I focus my attention and maybe try a few other tweaks to see how they look before I call it quits.

6. Export: as with any art, it’s hard to know when to stop, but at some point you have to tear yourself away and tap that save to camera roll button.

7. Publish: most of my stuff makes its way to Instagram, either accompanying one of my travel stories @avivgoeseast or on my art account @visualvariance.