Return to Honfleur

It's a port town that evokes memories of wonder and dread.

The Norman town, from where Samuel de Champlain set sail, in 1608, and ended up founding Québec City, was a highly anticipated stopover on our family vacation, through France, in the late summer of 2014. I couldn't wait to photograph the harbour, enclosed by tall buildings that housed shops and restaurants, which hadn't changed in centuries. My family and I couldn't wait to dine at one of the many seafood restaurants that overlooked the ships.

This town also reminds me of our first night, camping, on a site that had no quiet hours and where our neighbours were loud and obnoxious Russians who drank until five the next morning.

But on that afternoon, after we set up our tent, we explored the beautiful, famous port, and I snapped as many images as I could.

As with every trip my family and I take, we look at our photos upon our return and claim that we're going to print some to hang on our walls. In reality, picture space in our house is at a premium because of how we've arranged our rooms with book shelves and other furniture. There simply isn't enough wall space, unless we're willing to fill every blank space.

Maybe, we'll do that.

But once we agree on our favourite pictures, we never follow through and print them. That is, until this weekend.

DW and I decided that enough was enough, and we were finally going to blow up one of our photos from France. And so, I plugged my photo hard drive into our television and ran a pseudo-slide show. Because our TV has a 55-inch screen, anything that looked good on the display would look good as a smaller print.

There were lots of photos from which to choose: Paris, Rouen, Bayeux, Mont St-Michel, the Loire, le Perigord, Dordogne, and Provence.

We settled on Honfleur because of the reflection of the boats and town, and after narrowing down all of the images, we decided on this one:

The first image was fine, but I felt that the colours weren't true to what was visible to the naked eye, so I called up the RAW file and processed it again, this time using the latest version of the photo-editing software (at least two versions newer than when I first processed the image). I made the colours truer to the RAW image and I also cleaned up some of the debris in the water. The resulting edit is what we sent to the printer.

Eventually, we'll print even more photos. I'd like to enlarge some photos from our various trips to Italy, my images from Scotland, and from our vacation in Arizona.