Photography is an obsession. I’m sure it’s the same for me as it for many of you that read my posts who are also photographers. I’m nearly always thinking about photography, looking at the work of other photographers, spending far too much time on YouTube watching photography based content, or constantly looking around thinking about how what I am looking at would look through a viewfinder, captured and composed on a frame.
Most of the content I post on my website and in these newsletters and essays gravitates towards the serious. Photographs of our impact on the environment in which live, the cost of the energy that fuels our lives. I enjoy what my approach to photography brings me: a sense that I have something to say, a creative release, a sense of fulfilment. But every now and then it’s nice to just take the shackles off and enjoy photography for what it is – just lots of fun.
Going for our family summer holiday on the beautiful Ionian island of Lefkada in Greece provided the perfect opportunity to remember why I love photography so much in the first place.
For this trip I had invested in a digital point and shoot. I wanted to feel unburdened by lenses and SLR bodies and film choices. I took the plunge on a Panasonic Lumix DC-LX100 II before I travelled because I’d read good things about the digital sensor and the quality of the Leica Summilux zoom lens attached to the front of it.
I was not disappointed. I absolutely loved the sense of fun of having this little powerhouse in my pocket. It coped with nearly everything I asked it to do and having a zoom lens was surprisingly useful (my usual preference is usually for a prime).
But the most surprising thing for me about using this camera was that it reignited my love of colour photography. Most of the content on Frame to Grain and on my Substack has been black and white to this point. This is partly a factor of my preference for shooting film as opposed to digital, with black and white film and processing being cheaper than colour. But the little Lumix made me fall in love with colour all over again.
Of course, this is helped by the fact that Lefkada, like lots of Greek islands, just calls out for colour photography. The vibrancy of the colours, the saturation of the bright cloudless summer skies, and the hue of the Mediterranean colour palette would just not look the same in monochrome. But what was even more interesting to me was that the Lumix changed the way I was looking for compositions. I was looking for colour contrasts, looking for colour themes. In fact some of my recent Substack Note posts have been small series of pictures around a colour that has caught my eye on Lefkada.
The most surprising colour that caught my eye was the predominance of mint/pastel green (as well as lots of other colours) on many buildings in Lefkada Town. Typically we associate traditional Greek buildings with blue and white. It turns out that there is a specific reason that Lefkada Town is different – it sits in a major seismic zone, and a devastating 1825 earthquake (followed by more, including a big one in 1948 and 2015) forced a distinctive building method: stone masonry only on the ground floor, with light timber-frame upper storeys clad in corrugated sheet metal (since heavy upper floors would collapse and kill people). That sheet-metal cladding needs painting for weathering which is why the town looks so patchwork-colourful rather than uniform.
Whatever the reason it’s a colour photographer’s dream – lots of pastel colours everywhere. Will I continue to shoot in colour now I’m back from Greece? I’d certainly be more inclined to do so but that’s not actually the main thing I’ll take away from this trip.
Using the Lumix on Lefkada reminded me of how I first got into photography as a child. The pocketable point and shoot, combined with the nostalgic feel of long summer days abroad, reminded me of those family holidays we used to take when I was a kid. I was transported back to using a Kodak Instamatic 110-format camera – 24 exposures taken to Boots when I got home for processing or sent off to TruPrint or similar.
Photography back then was just something I did for fun. Using the Lumix reminded me that there is fun to be had in the simple act of looking around at what you see and pointing your lens at something just because it is interesting. No ulterior motive, no sense of having to say something. Just my eyes, colour everywhere, a camera that doesn’t get in the way, and good old summer holiday vibes!
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