napoca Archives - Pierre Pichot

Contrast: bright present, dark future

This photo was taken in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. It’s a photo that I really like, full of contrast. I don’t speak about its processing, here 🙂 Bright/dark, young/old, dark hair/white hair, white clothes/dark clothes… This young, beautiful, dark haired girl stands in the light while this older lady with a white hair and dark clothes stay in the dark. Is it a vision of her future? That may be!

While technically not perfect, it’s a photo I really like as it displays the 2 sides of women in Romania. On one side today’s beautiful girls, on the other side the older woman who lived during the communist era, a totally different life. Did I say contrast already? 🙂 It was a reflex shot, as I was roaming in the streets, on the phone, the camera in the other hand. I passed by them, hardly had the time to rotate by 135 degrees, take the camera to my eyes and shoot them. I wish I framed a bit more on the right, but one second later they both moved and the scene was gone.

For this photo, nothing really fancy on the processing side, just a black and white conversion with Adobe Lightroom and a few dodge and burn to give it a more 3D look.

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About this photo:

Camera: Canon 6D
Lens: Canon EF24-70mm f/2.8L II USM
Aperture: ƒ/5.6
Focale: 35mm
Shutter speed: 1/640s
ISO: 100
Copyright: Pierre Pichot 2015

2015-07-24/0 Comments/by Pierre Pichot

Photography

Commuting

And for this new Photo of the Week, one of my favourites photos, Commuting:

This photo was taken during Autumn 2014, on a rainy afternoon. The idea with this photo is to reflect the attitude of the people commuting usually from work to home, they are here physically but are in their own mind, thinking about their own business. The blur of the people shows this both “here but not really here” attitude.

Commuting was taken in a quite long exposure, almost 1 second, for a street photo. It helped creating the people’s blur… and also reduce the ISO and raise the quality, 2 birds with 1 stone! Of course a tripod was mandatory here. I wish I had an umbrella too, my poor Canon 6D was totally wet. At least I now know that the weatherproofing works great.

This photo has been processed in black and white with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, with an accent given on the black in order to reflect the global mood of the scene.

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2015-05-22/0 Comments/by Pierre Pichot

Photography

Five black knights

I crossed this group of black dressed people next to Piata Unirii in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Just after, having the sidewalk free, they spread in line, and walked like if they were in a movie. I immediately thought of the Nazguls, the infamous black knights (well… kings actually… nevermind) from The Lord of the Rings 😀

This photo has been processed with one of my favorite softwares ever, Google’s Nik Collection Silver Efex Pro, with of course my standard Lightroom workflow.

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2015-03-31/0 Comments/by Pierre Pichot

Photography

The book shop, the cross and the umbrella

A woman with a round umbrella in front of a book shop in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

I directly felt that I must take that shot. The strict, straight lines of the windows, of the shelves, of the books, contrast with the woman’s round umbrella and the light bulb. I did a the old black & white post processing with Alien Skin Exposure 7, which is a fantastic tool for film-like processing.

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2015-03-04/0 Comments/by Pierre Pichot