Over the Lunar New Year holiday, known as Tet ‘round here, it’s always a time to get off the grid, recharge the batteries and get ready for the upcoming months. Having planned this trip to Fuvamulah months ago, my calendar had plenty of x’s counting down the days to some island life and some underwater adventures. No underwater photos here, but plenty of that island vibe to go around. Though it rained a few days, I still love capturing those moments, too. It’s not all postcards and travel brochures. Oftentimes, we see these glossy images of famous destinations, Maldives especially with its ubiquitous drone shot of the overwater bungalow, and we never see the day to day type of images. Don’t get me wrong, those aerial shots of the overwater bungalows are lovely, but I could pay for multiple trips if I had a dollar for every one of these shots I’ve seen. Travel isn’t “perfect”… but because it isn’t, it makes us adapt and really dig into a new place. I could go down the road of traveling versus holidays/vacations, but you get my point. Lovely sunsets are interrupted with downpours, incredible destinations often take some hard and tedious journeys to get there, it’s….a process. Flat tires, delays, shitty airport food, unexpected flies in the ointment (or your soup)…. it all happens. I suppose I could boil it down to our expectations and how we self manage them but I’m sure I’d be ignoring some nuance somewhere. Whatever. Scrolling through the ‘gram leads us down this primrose path of picture perfect postcard bragging rights….. but sometimes that path ain’t pretty. Sometimes that path has puddles, a bit more rubbish than we’d like, and maybe we sit on the side of that path while we wait for a tire to be changed. But that’s the best part for me at least. The unexpected, the new, the moments where we have to get outside our comfort zones. All that being said, I wouldn’t characterize a bit of rain as hard yards or even begin to complain, but as I looked through these images, it reminded me of how there’s beauty in the imperfections.

All these images were shot on my little Fuji X100S. That new x100vi just got announced and has me wanting to pick up a new toy. Hopefully it won’t be on perpetual backorder like its predecessor. Edited in Capture One for those interested in post processing.