Tuesday, May 01, 2007

India - working on a sadhu

I was recently visiting the Sri Gopalswami Temple in Southern India. Periodically I visit the state of Karnataka on business. This trip I hauled the wee-digi-snapper instead of my usual 4x5 inch Ikeda Anba view camera. The goal was to get "sufficient" image quality while being mobile and unteathered to a tripod.

In general the experiment worked well. I was able to take images, look at them briefly and then reposition myself for another go at a subject if I felt it needed it.

The sadhu was sitting near the entrance of the temple and was begging for money. My colleague gave him a few rupees while I attempted to capture something of the spirit of this man and his way of being in the world.

After I returned home I "sampled" a chocolate color from one of the chocolate, well, colors. I dropped this into the Gimp to see what might happen. I LOVE this color, but I think I need to work a little on a few of the tones. I have images were I needed to bring the shadow detail "up" and the coloration in the highlights suffers to become nearly duo-tone.

In the mean time, here are three comparison color "samples". The first is Ken Lee's "Bronze Quadtone" palette.



This image was toned using a straight chocolate "sample" over the standard grayscale. No alterations were made beyond what Gimp gave me. I'm not sure I like the tones yet as it appears to be too magenta on my LCD displays.



The last image shared here is with a second chocolate color that I sampled. This time the color came from one of the commercial chocolate supplier backgrounds. After I "sampled" the color over a standard grayscale, I noticed that it too contained too much red or magenta for my taste. So I bumped the mid-tone yellow up a bit and tweaked the shadow with just a smidge of yellow too. It's not half bad and is getting closer to the chocolate tones I'm looking for. I may have to play with this palette a bit to get it "perfect", but at least this is a start.

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