The Making of "Rainy Evening in the City"

How the winning photo of the March contest was made

By neme-q in Photo Contests on Apr 25, 2020

"Rainy Evening in the City"

First of all I want to thank everyone who voted for my picture as well as everyone who participated and organised this monthly 'competition'. Every time, it is a pleasure to see what participants make of the theme.

My name is Edgard. I live in the Flemisch part of Belgium. I want to apologize for my strange Pentaxforums-name. I used that nickname in the time I flew radio controlled pylon racing models and that was the name of the plane I used. My passion for photography began in 1981 with the purchase of a Pentax MX camera. Nowadays, I still use Pentax cameras and a range of Pentax lenses. I take pictures of almost everything, but my photographic passion is nature, from wide landscapes to tiny objects.

The picture is made in Hasselt, a small district capital town in north-east Belgium. The city has a lot of pubs on the central market place. The pub with the beautiful lights is nowadays a hotel and the neon lights are gone. I shot the picture a few years ago on a rainy day in December.

The photo is made with my Ricoh GRII. This is my favorite camera for street photography. I prefer to not carry a big camera with a heavy tube of a lens when I am walking in cities and doing street photography. The Ricoh is very small, invisible, easy to handle and the pictures are perfect. I use it mostly to take pictures from the hip while I am walking so as to not disturb people or situations. For this I programmed a user setting in TAv, 1/250s, F4.0 with a prefixed focus distance of 2.5 meters, continuous shooting with the display off. The only thing people see when I make pictures is a small green led that flashes and even this could be avoided by using a small piece of gaffer tape. In this setting, the ISO is variable and for my rain-photo is was 6400; pretty high.

Original Image

It is rather difficult for me to explain exactly how I processed the image because I have no set standards. The first thing I always do is processing the RAW file in Adobe Camera RAW. There I do most of the things such as cropping, white balance, colors, contrast, etc. Afterwards I go to Photoshop and use plug-ins like Nik software and Raya pro. Again, no standard approach, I just do what feels right in the moment. In this case I cropped the picture and processed it in PS. I gave it a lot of vignetting and boosted the colors in NIK. I regained details in the man and the umbrella (camera RAW als filter). In this process, noise controlling was a continuous process because of the high iso and intense colors.

So, thanks again to the site administrators, to the participants and voters. All the luck for the challenge next month !!!

- Edgard (neme-q)

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