Simple Toning: Applying Tone into Three Sectors
It might look pretty simple to pick up produce and some flowers and start shooting. The reality for me is that it takes a lot of time to make arrangements and, despite my practice, very few succeed at providing the basis of an image I want to continue looking at.
I consider that this is another of the failures. The artichoke leaves look more like slightly battered seashells than like anything to be thought edible that anyone other than the most committed gastronome. Daisy-shaped mums are a flower for which I always feel I must apologize. My intentions sprang from thinking about vague similarity in the petal shapes and the contrast of warm and cool colors. The vision was of a flower poised to vault out of its organic frame; the realization is of a bloom suppressed or even crushed.
The desaturation and subsequent simple toning with color balance heaped fiasco on top of failure. Ultimately, the best course seemed to be to let cool colors show the utter lack of vitality on show. It hardly seems worth pointing out that fiddling with levels somewhat revived the color photo; resuscitating a failed experiment is nothing to brag about.
next page: Worm’s Eye View; Duotone or
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