259 - Keep Stepping

I really have to be quick now. It’s well past 1am and I’ll drive to Croatia tomorrow. I’ll return on Tuesday. The hotel is supposed to have wireless LAN, but one can never know. I’ll have a laptop with me and I’ll try to keep posting an image per day, but if I fail, at least you know when to expect me back.

This is the only image that I shot today. I did it with the Nikon 50/1.8 at f4. In the morning I was in a hurry and extremely laden, thus I took the underground. This is the exit and I took the image because of the lines and the shadows.

The original was almost monochrome and I could have left it at that, but instead I went to Lab mode and applied a modified “Man From Mars”: desaturate, Man from Mars, saturate by steepening a/b, saturate once again, with all layers but the desaturation having a mask applied that is middle gray in the light areas, white in the shadows. The effect is, that all saturation steps are fully applied to the shadows and only half to the lit areas. Furthermore, to avoid having the blacks and the whites going blue, the Man from Mars is softly blended out in the extreme blacks and whites. Oh yeah, and I have increased contrast on the the right side of the image, the shadow half. Anything else? Yes, some transplantation of texture into the burnt out highlights.

Honestly, I think the difference is striking and the result looks quite natural, even though the image has no similarity with what was actually there 🙂

The Song of the Day, “Keep Stepping”, is a short 21 second piece from Moloko’s 2000 album “Things to Make and Do”. There is not much in terms of lyrics here, but when heard as a sound loop, it matches the exaggerated steepness of the steps extraordinarily well.

Good night, see you hopefully tomorrow.