Optical 88
OK, first you guys were killing me with your beautiful beach photos... next you're killing me with your great Chinatown pictures! I had to get into the act somehow :-), so I dug into my archives. This photo is from August 2004, taken in New York's Chinatown on a beautiful summer Saturday. I took the shot with my Digital Rebel, in color, of course, but seeing it on my computer a week later, it looked like it would be better as B&W. But that red awning just had to stay!
I used a "hue and saturation" adjustment layer in Photoshop Elements 2 and "painted over" the red parts of the awning. Then I used the Saturation slider to desaturate the photo - the parts that were masked by "painting over" stayed unaffected, while removing the color from the rest of the image.
All this makes me very nostalgic about getting back to NYC - Chinatown and Little Italy, situated right next to each other across Canal Street, are both full of great photo opportunities as well as very nice people!
posted by SteveR at 8:32 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Hi Steve,
Fun shot! I've always liked photos that isolated a single color like this. In fact, I posted one a while back of a couple of red bell peppers. I did it as an exercise to try it for myself.
That woman walking by has a wild outfit on, you often see that type of clothing here too.
Do you have a Chinese community where you live now?
--Warren
p.s. I've been having trouble uploading pics to blogger since last night. Anyone experiencing problems with this, or is it just me?
Hi Warren,
As far as I know, there's no distinctly Chinese neighborhood in the Baltimore-Annapolis area - the Chinese community here is is pretty well assimilated into the general community. There is a small Chinatown in Washington,DC - it keeps getting smaller as urban renewal encroaches on it. But after you asked, I Googled for information on that community, and it turns out I missed a nice Chinese New Year parade there! Maybe next year.
One of the things I really missed when I left New York City and came back to Maryland over 20 years ago was the cultural diversity of NYC. I loved the fact that I could walk out of my office on 51st & Lexington at lunchtime and hear four or five different languages before I had walked five blocks. Central Maryland in the early '80s was fairly "boring" by comparison.
But fortunately, that's changing here, and our area has grown much more diverse in the last decades, with a lot of high-tech jobs attracting people from South Asia and East Asia.
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