a post-processing question

Madison

Hi everyone,

I just saw the excellent book 'The Hyena & Other Men' and have a qeuestion. Apart from the fact that the series is stunning, content-wise, the post processing of the images is breathtaking.

http://bp0.blogger.com/_4XyYkHjpjfA/R1S09y0vNNI/AAAAAAAABEE/zGbl-JdFlL4/s1600-h/19.jpg

http://www.lipsticktracez.com/reggie/2008/06/14/17.jpg

The brownisg tone and decreased saturation has nice color accents. Colors will be muted except for blues and reds in some pictures that add beautiful touches. How is this achieved? Does anybody know? (I use Lightroom for most of my processing and Photoshop for local adjustments impossible to do in Lightroom).

Thanks so much in advance for your thoughts. Oh and if you're in a bookstore: pick it up or have a look. It's magnificent.

Madison

Madison

Oh I just stumbled across an interview where he mentions the colors. Apparently it's the dusty atmosphere and the light in the desert that creates these colors. Here is the specific question asked:

Well, it’s terrific work, so powerful, so original. I want to know a little about the look of the pictures. They have a great color quality — they’re rich, but they also have something of a washed out, hand-colored look. What kind of camera are you shooting with and what are you doing in the processing to get that distinctive image quality?

If you look at the pictures, very few of them have defined shadows, and that’s because most of the pictures were taken during the season of the Saharan dust storms, and it creates a natural scrim [a fabric screen photographers use to diffuse light]. And you’ll see there are not very contrasty shadows in the pictures, it’s flat, diffused light. I shot on 120 film. I used a Hasselblad and Mamiya [large format] cameras. Sometimes I used a tripod because often I shot very early in the morning or very late in the afternoon. Everything’s covered in the dust, which gives it the washed out look. Early on I did desaturate a slight amount, but when I went back to scan them I looked at the contact prints and realized I hadn’t really done very much. The final prints are pretty close to what the contacts look like. It’s an interpretive print, no matter what you do with it, but I purposely kept it flat because they were shot at that time of the year when everything is covered in dust.