“From Clee to heaven a beacon burns,

The Shires have seen it plain,

from North and South the sign returns

And beacons burn again.”

Starting a piece of writing with a quotation is akin to downloading all your pictures on to your computer, and turning them into high-contrast ‘black and white’ images. Magically, regardless of the subject matter, the output instantly takes on an air of respectability. ‘Oh, black and white…must be a professional!’, mutters the unsuspecting viewer to himself, while the scheming photographer drags the saturation button all the way left on his next post. It’s a fail-safe way of garnering attention on any photography site – try it! The next best way is to have a profile name like ‘FemaleNudeYoga, but then again, it all depends on how desperate you are for attention.

Photography, I feel, is one of the trickier forms of art (but then again, I can imagine someone write now sitting on his laptop, writing ‘XXX, I feel, is one of the trickier forms of art). Since its representation of the world is so visually realistic and unambiguous, it is very hard to ‘allow’ within it the space for the viewer to read in his or her own interpretations. So, it’s somewhat of a fine balance between nudging the viewer in the general direction you want her to go, and yet allowing her to ramble around and find her own spot. Most of the black and white photographs that we see today are like a huge billboard saying ‘PROCEED TO POINT X.’ So, the challenge seems to be more in COLOR!

Which brings me to today’s post (actually it doesn’t, for the preceding paragraphs have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what follows, but what the hell, they still sounded good, right? I am a sucker for the occasional black and white too!). If you’re amongst the millions of loyal readers of this blog (well, it’s more like 117 readers, but we’re getting there…), you’ll be aware of the minor misunderstanding that had cropped up between the missus and me. I’m happy to inform you today that the matter has finally been resolved, and there is relative peace and quiet at home. And not unlike resilient Indians dropping in on to a bombing site hoping to catch a glimpse of some devastation at someone else’s expense , the camera and other photography equipment are beginning to crawl on to the scene once more. The following images form part of the elaborate confidence-building-measures (CBM) that were drawn up following the truce:

This is one of the first shots from yesterday’s session with the missus. It was shot in the bedroom at around 6 PM. The room was fairly well-lit, but since I was using external lights, that doesn’t really come into the equation. The shutter speed is at a maximum of 1/200s (sync speed – any faster than this, and it wouldn’t be open long enough for it to capture the flashes), and the aperture was at F/20. The aperture was kept low as the softbox on the right of camera was too close to her, and would have blown out the highlights otherwise. The post-processing is fairly straight-forward: after the regular spot-healing, curves, etc., a solid color layer was added, the opacity brought down to about 40% and the blending mode changed to ‘Hue’. That’s what lends the image the warm, glowy look. The background was lit with a Vivitar from camera left, through a brown water bottle. On top of this is a simple texture courtesy Jerry Jones, aka GhostBones. It was inserted as a new layer, and a layer mask was applied to let the original image come through. After a minimal level of color balance, a vignette effect was applied via Filters>Distort>Lens Correction. All this might seem kind of complicated to you if you are as proficient in PS as I am. But believe me, I was almost as clueless about the various steps while doing them. I just knew how I wanted my missus to look like – with a lot of trial and error, I tried filling up the missing steps in between to get that image (including the regular groveling on the knees, and pleading her to pose for me, sigh!). Also, if I were to re-do this, I would crop out the empty space on top of the missus’ head – the image would look much better with a tighter composition, methinks.

This one was taken at f/10, and quite frankly, it was fairly blown out (for the reasons specified above). But since I click in RAW (Google that if you don’t know about it, and liberally sprinkle it in your next conversation with friends and family), I retrieved a lot of the detail PS. Thereafter, the PS work was more or less similar to the last image. The only difference in the look that I wanted a bit more directionality in the lighting of the scene. If you look closely, the lighting on the background in the previous picture is fairly even from left to right, although it falls off pretty sharply on the missus. Also, the light appears very soft. I wanted the light to be a little harder, and fall off equally on background. For this, what I did was use the crop tool to select the entire image, and then drag the right border such that the image doubled in width (the image itself would of course remain the same width, but there would be some blank space to the right that PS would think is part of the image. Post that, I applied a sharp vignette. The vignette on the right-side hence was applied to the blank space that was created in the last step, which I then cropped out. I am sure there are much better ways of doing this kind of thing, but this works too . If I were to re-do this, I would have not reduced the exposure of the image in PS by as much. That would have helped retain some of the glow that you see in the previous image. I did try getting it back via curves, but was losing a lot of detail in the shadows (and I was too lazy to start all over again).

And if you’re still wondering what the heck does the poem at the beginning of the post have to do with all of this, well it’s absolutely nothing. It just looks good, like a perfect black and white image.

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Comments ( 4 )

Excellent photos…. Well lit, and very well processed.

Great article too.

Gary added these pithy words on Oct 08 08 at 8:54 pm

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