Photos

This was another one of those serendipitous travel moments. As a part of my 'spiritually saigon' project I had been all over the Cholon district trying to find a chinese buddhist temple that I had vistied earlier in the wek without my camera (grrr). I didn't find it, but after going to so many, I thought that I might as well go into this one which was on my way home (I do know the nam, but not off the top of my head. I'll have to dig out the old LP). This was the scene that greeted me! My first thoughts were "this is is wasted on me, I'm not good enough to capture this event!" In a way, I was right (about this picture anyway). In my haste I focused on the incense hanging from the ceiling as it was the closest thing to me, but neglected to set an aperture that would render the whole room sharp (or at least the main subjects ie. the beam of light and the weapons). Oh well. I still think this picture is really good.

In PS this was scanned from a negative, cropped off some of the LH side to put the weapons off centre, converted to mono using channel mixer (I scan my BW negs as colour, the convert as I find it works better that way), used curves to set shadow and highlights, then brightened the mids, used hue/sat to colorize slightly with a goldish tint. I wanted to give the look of a selenium tinted print, as this is a timeless look.