Busking

15Jun10

Busking is a long and honourable tradition in London.  However, I have rarely heard or seen such an adept performance as that of this quartet playing classical music in Covent Garden.  They expressed a real sense of fun, for example playing Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ while parodying the dance.  This is not easy to do if you are playing a cello.  The place was packed, with spectators lining the railings above the players.  So, this is long-distance shot with the GX200, heavily cropped.  I kept it at base ISO as well, so there is also some motion blur, which I am happy with because this expresses the movement in the performance.

A GX200 shot converted from Raw in Aperture 3 and cropped to a square shape.  I used full recovery to bring back some of the blown highlights, nudged the black point right and slightly reduced the brightness.  The image had a slight boost to overall contrast.  A moderate clipping s-curve was used to further increase contrast, with a second curve to pull some of the detail out of the shadows.  The musicians were lightly dodged.  The image was converted to black and white in Aperture with a yellow filter preset.  Finally a vignette was applied.

Filed under: Aperture, B&W, Street, Travel   |  1 Comment
Tags: Aperture, B&W, GX200, Ricoh, Ricoh GX200, Street, Travel