Green Shutters is an image I captured while wandering with my wife in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans in July 2017.
The building itself is on Decatur street near the intersection with Frenchman street.
We had started our meanderings in the French Quarter and the French Market. Our destination was the St. Roch Market for lunch.
In the evening, (in non-pandemic times) the area around Decatur and Frenchman is pulsating with nightlife – food and music course through these arteries of the city,
In the mid-morning, not so much. The streets are quiet and the pace is genteel. Ideal conditions for a photo walk even if not during the golden hour.
I find that almost everywhere you look in New Orleans there's a photograph waiting to be captured.
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Negative Space
In this image I explore the concept of negative space – that area around the subject.
When I first noticed the scene I took the image below:
I really wanted the whole wall but you can see the grey car was obstructing that view.
Most of the time I have my camera set for HDR bracketing of -2EV, 0EV, +2EV. The image I decided to process was the +2EV image.
The auto exposure of modern cameras is set to reproduce a neutral scene. Point your camera at a white wall and it will produce a grey image. To record the image as white you have to over expose, you have to give the camera more light than it's program is asking for.
In my framing of the shutter, I have deliberately offset the shutter to the left and top of the frame rather than keeping it dead central.
While I'm a fan of symmetry, placing the shutters in the middle of the frame resulted in a somewhat boring composition. Shifting the shutters to create uneven negative space around the subject creates more intrigue in the image.
The subject is off-balance which is unexpected in nature. Tweaking the white in Adobe Lightroom leads to the image appearing to float on the page.
Image Processing:
For this image I:
- Straightened and cropped the image in Adobe Lightroom
- Tweaked the contrast in Adobe Lightroom
- Cloned out the two balcony brakets above the window in Adobe Photoshop
Image Processing:
- Simple adjustments in Adobe Lightroom
- Color adjustments in NIK Color Efex Pro 5 by DxO
- Additional adjustments in Adobe Photoshop
Camera and Lens:
- Canon EOS 5D Mark III
- Canon EF-28-300mm f/3.5-5.6L IS USM
- Handheld at ISO 400, 1/30 sec at f/18
