
I stayed at a resort for the base of my holiday to Fiji – ‘Fiji Beach Resort & Spa, Managed by Hilton’ to be more precise. It was a nice place – great service, rooms, food etc. – not something I am very used to really (pitching a tent is more what I am used to).
Getting up one morning early (it appears only the staff aside from me did this) I made my way to the breakfast restaurant and caught this image. I was drawn to the orderly nature of the chairs & it got me thinking how organised the whole relaxation ‘thing’ is. Here we have rows of deckchairs overlooking a beautiful beach with a couple of great clean salt free pools. People travel thousands of miles to get in early with their towel to book a chair they can then lay in the sun on for the rest of the day. Most people read books, but with the advent of mobile technology I cant help but think that many were still keeping tabs with work and not really relaxing (one reason I chose to go technology free aside from my camera).
Personally I get more relaxation going for a walk, which I did a lot of, checking out and discovering new sights and sites. But throughout the week, when returning for a swim I got to recognise the same individuals in their favourite chairs getting browner and browner – or redder and redder. I’m certainly not knocking it, its just a bit foreign to me!
Back to the image, I did a little post processing in Gimp. I first gave the image a light lomo effect filter with some vignette, followed by a cross-processing filter with a blue tint.. I then cropped the aspect a little, removing some dead space in behind the first chair in the image. Struggling to find the title I wanted, I finally settled on ‘Choose, Sit, Relax’