Street photography in a Dani village

cocasana · February 20, 2007

Women cooking a piglet in a Dani village in the Kurulu area, Baliem valley, Papua Barat, Indonesia. They build a sort of oven made with burning stones. They put a layer of burning stones, ferns, the piglet, ferns, sweet potatoes, ferns, burning stones. 1 and 1/2, 2 hours and lunch is ready. Excellent. Also the ferns are quite good!
Canon 1dmk2, Canon 24-70mm f/2.8
I would very interested to hear your comments, opinions, critiques!
Thanks, Carlo

Skippy · February 20, 2007

cocasana wrote:

Women cooking a piglet in a Dani village in the Kurulu area, Baliem valley, Papua Barat, Indonesia. They build a sort of oven made with burning stones. They put a layer of burning stones, ferns, the piglet, ferns, sweet potatoes, ferns, burning stones. 1 and 1/2, 2 hours and lunch is ready. Excellent. Also the ferns are quite good!
Canon 1dmk2, Canon 24-70mm f/2.8
I would very interested to hear your comments, opinions, critiques!
Thanks, Carlo

It's ashame we corrupt their way of life with so many things, I know some things are good, but other introduced things really take a toll.

When you visit a village like this one it really hits home as to how materialistic we are in the Western World.

A very interesting shot.......thanks for sharing...... Skippy

.

Angelo · February 20, 2007

It's an interesting shot and more so because of your explanation but absent the prose would the shot really hold our interest? It's a sneak-peak snapshot as - is.

The smoke from the fire pit is casting an unnatural blue cast. Someone better skilled in PS can tell you if a little WB work might help shift that to white.

I also would've liked if you had dropped to one knee to shoot this, leveling yourself more at the height of the focal point. But a truly great photo here would've been if one of the 4 people who make up the left and right border had turned, walked toward you about 12 - 15 feet and looked right at the camera.

cocasana · February 20, 2007

Someone better skilled in PS can tell you if a little WB work might help shift that to white.

Thank you for stopping and commenting!
Angelo: I'm afraid the smoke had that colour. Anyway its my habit to colour balance my photos. Between the various techniques those I prefer are the Black and White method (I think its also called by numbers), and the one in which you use a 50% gray layer to find a neutral gray. This shot has been checked with both methods. BTW I've calibrated my monitor 3 days ago.
Possibly this shot would have been better if I would have dropped one knee, but relatively to the Dani people position I must tell you I prefer natural sets. I'm not the kind of person that, in a situation like this one, tells somebody where to stand for a pic!

Angelo · February 20, 2007

cocasana wrote:

Someone better skilled in PS can tell you if a little WB work might help shift that to white.

Thank you for stopping and commenting!
Angelo: I'm afraid the smoke had that colour. Anyway its my habit to colour balance my photos. Between the various techniques those I prefer are the Black and White method (I think its also called by numbers), and the one in which you use a 50% gray layer to find a neutral gray. This shot has been checked with both methods. BTW I've calibrated my monitor 3 days ago.
Possibly this shot would have been better if I would have dropped one knee, but relatively to the Dani people position I must tell you I prefer natural sets. I'm not the kind of person that, in a situation like this one, tells somebody where to stand for a pic!

If I wasn't clear before please understand that I meant "someone better skilled THAN I". I'm not very good with PS work.

And I wasn't suggesting you needed to move people into a pose. I was just imagining some of the incredible tribal shots I've seen over the years in magazines such as National Geographic.

LilleG · February 20, 2007

Nice capture and an interesting shot, Carlo. I like it just the way it is. Thank you for sharing.

Marc Muench · February 20, 2007

Cocasana

What a fantastic opportunity! Thanks for sharing it.

Regarding color balance, I have a very simple method using one curves layer to set the black point. The reasons for setting the black point in an image are lengthy usually a 1/2 day lesson in my workshops. However, the point is that our eyes compare things to black and if there is a black than all the other colors in an image make sense even if they are not perfectly true. I set the black point on your image with one layer than with one more curves adj layer pulled the center of the rgb curve down to darken overall. I than brushed out a few key spots to lighten them up. The smoke in the center is what I used to check your original color balance, the numbers were ( Red - 175, green - 183, blue - 192) explaining the blue cast. I believe the image needed a bit more drama which is why I darkened it overall. Maybe you agree maybe not

either way thanks again for sharing

pathfinder · February 20, 2007

Wow!!

This is one of the reasons why I am so looking forward to spending a weekend with Marc in southern Utah.

Nice increase in color density and balance on my monitor at work.

cocasana · February 21, 2007

Thank you all for stopping and commenting!
Marc: your version of my pic is quite nice, but the light that day wasn't that harsh. Actually it wasn't harsh at all!
I don't think that one can assume that smoke is always neutral gray. If you burn humid wood, for example, at least here around, it makes a yellowish smoke.
I don't know with what they made their fire, but -I'm so terribly sorry- the smoke had that bluish-cyano cast.

Seneca · February 21, 2007

Skippy wrote:

It's ashame we corrupt their way of life with so many things, I know some things are good, but other introduced things really take a toll.

When you visit a village like this one it really hits home as to how materialistic we are in the Western World.

A very interesting shot.......thanks for sharing...... Skippy
.

Skippy you hit the nail right on the head. I don't see these women wearing the expense jeans or the VS bras - hell even their size is there for the men to see.

It's hard to be a woman here in the states...:cry

Love the picture.

System · February 21, 2007

The woman smoking a cig has me baffled. Looks like an amzing trip.

Marc Muench · February 21, 2007

cocasana wrote:

Thank you all for stopping and commenting!
Marc: your version of my pic is quite nice, but the light that day wasn't that harsh. Actually it wasn't harsh at all!
I don't think that one can assume that smoke is always neutral gray. If you burn humid wood, for example, at least here around, it makes a yellowish smoke.
I don't know with what they made their fire, but -I'm so terribly sorry- the smoke had that bluish-cyano cast.

Cacosana
I like the way you think!

Smoke is not always gray, in fact this fact is what makes all color balance so difficult. However, since you have a wonderful memory of the scene than you can use that to aid you in your decisions. Most of the time we don’t remember the shade of colors in the field. The method of setting a neutral black point is used to create something believable when exact color in the field is not known. In addition, all digital cameras leave a cast of some kind in the shadows. So long as you know where the cast came from you can then change it to your liking. If your preference is less contrast and yet you still want to set a black point here is what you can do.

In the example image above what I did was set a rgb target point of 555 that means Red = 5, Green = 5 and Blue = 5. Since 0 is absolute black on the scale, 5 is quite dark. To achieve less contrast but retain the neutral black point, simply alter the target point to a higher value such as 15, 15, 15.

Your use and understanding of the RGB numbers in a image file to color balance is what will allow you to achieve the best results especially when going to print.

cocasana · February 22, 2007

Marc: in one of my previous post I've wrote that I've applied two methods to neutralize white, black, e midtones. The result was only slightly different from a general color correction I did to all the photos I took from that point of view in -lets say- 10/15 minutes, with a WhiBal Reference Card. Before color correction the shot had a yellowish cast.
The result, quite fortunately, coincide with what I remember now and with what I remembered when I converted the photo. That was probably the same evening, or the day after I shot it. I will check the Metadata.

Marc Muench · February 22, 2007

I'm not quite sure I follow? Please let me know what you find.

cocasana · February 22, 2007

The photo was shot the 18th October 2005, converted from the original Raw format the 20th Octobe 2005.

Street photography in a Dani village

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