This past weekend was the Festival of Nations in St. Louis, a yearly weekend festival that is full of vendors, food, music, and arts. Certainly a great place to get photos from all sorts of angles, but I was happiest with the photos I got from the henna art station. To tell this mini-story I wanted the finished design to be in all the shots, so I kept that in mind as I was shooting. I also wanted a progression, so here is the first stroke:
Then I walked around and was shooting from a spot behind:
Then I went with the finished product:
Which now that you have seen the finished art, you can go back and see it on the paper as well. As I was shooting at the festival, I kept my ISO relatively high. This was because despite the bright sunlight, most of my shots were taken in the shade. I knew I wasn’t going to be too concerned with noise in the final versions of the photos so an ISO of 1600 pretty much guaranteed I could take shots everywhere. You will notice that even though these three shots that were taken in a similar area, I was changing my shutter speed a lot. After having set my ISO and also keeping my f-stop at a fixed 5.6, the shutter speed was how I was controlling the exposure on this particular outing.
When I got the photos home, I decided that I did not want to crop or sharpen them. I decided to apply a photo filter that replicates Polaroid 690 film. I felt that the slight color change and slightly grainy look was a good match with photos from a festival like this one. So that you can see the difference, here is the middle photo before editing:
It’s a subtle difference, do you think it adds to the story here? Feel free to comment below.
Cheers!
Brilliant trio of shots, and they most certainly tell the story of the henna that came to be 🙂 I thought the filter was a great choice post-processing – it certainly brought out the subject’s arm and the artwork. Interesting to hear that you were controlling exposure with shutter speed. Makes sense since I suppose you wanted the henna to stand out in the shots.
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Thanks Mabel, in my head before I used the filter I was thinking, what would make this look more like it was taken at a fair than was held in the summer, and this look is what came to mind.
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I liked how you used different angles to show the progression of a single event. Good job 🙂
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Thanks!
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That is simply beautiful ! Great interpretation of the challenge 🙂
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Thank you, I’m glad you like it.
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Fascinating! My first exposure to henna art too, so thank you for this lesson. 😀
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Thanks, I love the look of it.
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Amy … I love the set up of the henna shots and the finished shot on the subject’s arm. You did a great job of capturing the progression from every angle. 😉
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Thanks!
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I too love tomake henna on my hands.
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It’s beautiful, I think.
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Beautiful job.. I love the henna design too. 😉
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Thanks so much!
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Very nice photo essay! The Polaroid filter works very well. Is it part of a software package? Which one?
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Thank you, I have version 3 of this DxO film pack:
http://www.dxo.com/us/photography/photo-software/dxo-filmpack
It works nicely as a plug-in to Photoshop.
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I have never seen henna being applied so the angles you have chosen really tell the story.
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I had never watched this process either, so I pulled out my camera of course 🙂
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