Rangoon
Burma, 2011
I shot several city streets in Rangoon or Yangon as it is now called. The streets had a personality unlike our orderly streets. Men armed with only a hammer or a screwdriver set up temporary repair shops, women carried pots of home cooked noodles and boiled broth to corners where they welcomed hungry diners to their ‘restaurant’, taxi drivers smoked and waited for someone…oh, please God, make it a tourist who wants to go to the airport.
And yet, I didn’t like any of my street shots and this morning I finally figured out why. Most of them show too much sky. Sky is not what I want when I try to show a city street. I want to show the beating pulse of the city.
And even after I decided that I liked this shot well enough, I still wasn’t happy with it. I used a technique I learned from a lesson given by Topaz Labs to make the colors brighter. It also emphasized the lines almost turning the photo into a cartoon. Nope. I didn’t like that either. Today, as I searched for a photo to show you, I took my own advice and turned to a toned black and white. Now, I’m happy. My street is the epitome of a busy street in Asia where people know the meaning of the old saying “make hay while the sun shines”.
Check YouTube for Topaz Labs’ instructional videos. It’s fun to learn new post processing techniques.