March, week 1:
I went to seattle and had the chance to wander around Pike's market. Fortunately it was a sunny day, and the outdoor produce stands had a stunningly brilliant color that I did not expect out of the normally rather grey city. The color version of this image turned out fairly well (even though I forgot to switch the ISO, which I kept at the 400 I was using inside... I prefer 100 when possible). The color image was fairly easy to produce (no pun intended), given the colorful subject matter and excellent lighting.
The difficulty here was in the greyscale conversion with the channel mixer. If you look at images with just the red, green, and blue channels, you get very different looking images. In particular, all of the fruits and veggies looked black on the blue channel. While it was easy playing around with the channel to make an image that was visually appealing, I thought it was also important to have the different produce items somewhat recognizable. While a high contrast black lemon may look cool, it wouldn't really look like a lemon. After adjusting in multiple ways, I determined that for this subject matter the green channel seemed to contain detail, red channel brightness, and blue channel contrast/darkness. I ended up choosing a green-dominant balance (50%), with some red to maintain brightness (25%), and just enough of the blue channel to give it a contrasty black-and-white feel.
Overall the trip to Seattle was great, and i will likely be posting some more pics from my explorations. For this image I added another category of my photo-a-week goals, street photography, which this seems to fit very well. I also posted the color version of this image, which I may start doing more regularly.
Image details:
Date and location: 3/1/7 at 14:56 PST, Pike's market, Seattle, WA
Equipment: Canon 30D, 17-85mm IS lens, Hoya SMC UV filter
Settings: 41mm, handheld with IS, ISO 400, f/14, 1/400 sec, shot in raw
Processing: cataloged in Aperture v1.5.2, export as 16 bit tiff, to photoshop, USM (150, 1.0, 0) -> monochrome (channel mixer 25, 50, 15) -> resize -> USM (100, 1.0, 0) -> border -> save for web
Photo-a-week goals addressed: #1 (b+w), #16 (street photography)
color version
2 comments:
I like the color version better. I think I would like the b&w better without the signs, but the owner might not be too happy!
I think its needing the color with that large variety in fruits and vegetables. I heard pikes market was the best!
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