As I’ve mentioned in other places, the thing about some images is that you make them and you look at them and think either… nothing there, yet you don’t delete them or you think.. there is something there and I just haven’t figured out what it is or how i want to get the image to look.

This seems to be happening a lot for me at the moment, I’m finding that as I tidy up my image archives, currently sitting a tad over 7000 images of which I’m trying to kill half of them some images pop up and catch my attention. This happened the other week when I was working on the laptop on some images I’d done for a wide angled detail project (yes detail shots with a wide angle 10mm lens… nice!). I came a cross some images that I’d taken in Sept 2006 all based around a bottle of Scapa Malt Whisky my father had left here when he visited and it was around the time we first found out he had cancer.

It was really the 1st time I went out with a specific, intention in mind to make an image I could dedicate I guess, but really wasn’t sure what i wanted. I did in the end, come up with an image that I liked at  the time, my young brother really likes it. Anyway the other day I sat down with these images again and within maybe an hour I’d reworked a couple of them to come up with something new that i have to say I love to bits, far better than the original concept and images.

Entitled Slàinte maith which means Good Health, this is far closer to what i think this image is all about for me. It’s got a nice balance, it’s all about the drink here or rather the toast. I’m not trying to make an add for the drink but it’s just got  a nice restful feel about it which when your sharing a dram with someone is what it’s about, it’s that relaxing and restful sense with good friends.

Slàinte maith 2 in a portrait version of the image which really works

With the  bottle taking so much of the frame. Again I think there are plenty of places for your eye to explore but ultimately you come back and rest on the text of the bottle which is around  a third of the page, apparently a pleasing place for items in an image.

The portrait version came about by accident, I was framing up the landscape image for printing and pout a virtual frame around it in lightroom, picked the wrong one and hey presto there was the portrait version.

 

 

 

The final image is this one called Raise a Glass which is obviously me sitting with a glass of the Scapa raising a toast to Dad. The original image was called Toast Two, I have to say I much prefer these three images as a set. When you link them up with the laphroig images that I have done it starts to make an interesting set I have to say.

 

 

Anyway the point of the discussion was really about the fact these images were all done in Sept 2006, it’s only now, April 2009 that I’m actually getting an image I really like out of them and I’m very glad i never threw them away, it makes me ponder what other treasures I may have lurking around in the collection that I could actually do something with now that I’ve got a different view point on the images and more skills in the post processing side of things.