It took me 8 months to edit the pictures.
In May 2020 I took a night ride through Piraeus, Athen’s harbor city with my Greek friend Alex. On our way back from a trip on the island of Salamina he suggested us to drive through the dark city of Piraeus. He wanted to show me the city and I took out my Leica Q2 camera and started shooting from the passenger seat.
I set the camera to auto ISO, the aperture to f1.7 and the exposure time to 1/50 seconds. And I started shooting into the night lit streets and the traffic that we encountered.
It became a fascinating experience. We were driving through dark suburban streets where we found islands of light that appeared in front of us and disappeared again within one or two seconds. I shot picture after picture, aware that with the relative slow exposure time of 1/50 seconds I would have some blur effect (in order to “freeze” a scene that you shoot from a driving car you need to use at least 1/250 second, better 1/500 or even shorter).
I uploaded the RAW pictures in the following week to my external hard drive, created the usual backup files on a second external hard drive and then I didn’t touch them for a few weeks.
When revisiting the pictures for the first time I found them a little boring and did not know what exactly to do with them. The motion blur was kind of interesting but it did not give the pictures shape and and any fascinating feeling. I processed some of the pictures, posted some on Flickr but neither me nor my followers were particularly interested in the results.
Not bad - but not really interesting either……
Kind of moody - but something is missing…..
And then I forgot about them. I had many other interesting subjects to shoot and I did my editing of these pictures. The Piraeus ones were on the hard drive and I did not touch them.
8 months later I accidentally came across he pictures again. And immediately I knew what to do. I had just worked with the Nik editing apps recently. So I took the RAW pictures, transferred them to Nik Color Efex where I applied some presets that suited the dark, moody atmosphere of the night and the environment.
Thew same picture with a new edit
In a second step I exported the pictures to Photoshop where I used the blur tools to enhance the motion blur effect that the pictures already had.
Color cast and blur effect
And in a last step I added some texture and clarity in lightroom and did some local enhancements of light and colors. The editing of each single picture took me between 15 and 30 minutes. That includes the time I sometimes took between step 2 and 3 in order to re-evaluate my results and to start doing my local adjustments in Lightroom.
And all of a sudden the pictures had a feel that reflected the mysterious atmosphere that we had experienced during the ride through the city of Piraeus.
We often read the recommendation to let the pictures “mature” after the shooting and to let them “rest” for a while. I often don’t follow that recommendation. But in this case leaving the pictures alone and coming back with fresh and unbiased eyes gave me the opportunity to create a completely new and different approach. Revisiting the older ones can make a lot of sense. I love the results……