India Bangalore Market    Bangalore, India

About the Scene: I took these photos while on a business trip to India.  Bangalore is the technology capital of India -- the Indian equivalent of Silicon Valley.  After concluding a week of work, I had my driver take me to the market before catching my return flight.  My business colleagues were decidedly against my visit there.  After a week of dining in four star hotels and seeing the pinnacle of their technical prowess, the crowded dirty market wasn't their idea of an impressive site.  And I understand why.  To them, this is an ordinary place -- a place where the less-fortunate members of society meet to scrape out a living in the city.  But I anticipated something more -- an opportunity to connect with some of the people at the heart of India's national heritage.

The people in the market make very eager photographic subjects.  They are friendly and eager to be photographed.  People frequently posed, and no one asked for money.   Despite the need for basic street smarts, the market was the safest I'd ever been in (compared to Morocco, Peru, etc.).



The Photographic Process: For this series of photos, I used a minimum amount of in-camera tuning.  By default, all digital cameras make a number of improvements to the images that are captured on the imaging chip.  Images are adjusted for proper color and sharpened.  That instant gratification costs us the a lot of artistic control.  So I elected to adjust the camera, and tune the images myself on my PC. 

The Digital Post-Processing:  After getting the raw images out of the camera, I pulled them into Photoshop, and worked on the color and sharpening.  This added significantly to the amount of time required to process the images, but gave me results that far exceeded my expectations.  I made all my changes in layers and saved and saved the files in the native Photoshop format.  This way return to make small adjustments, and I have added benefit of an unedited original layer.  Once I had the images ready for printing, I used Photoshop's droplet functionality to easily create one set of JPEG files for printing, and a second set for reduced-resolution files for the web.  The droplet functionality is a huge time-saver. 

For all of these photos, I used Canon's 17-40L.  For the first time, I've decided that a professional-quality "L Series" lens such as this is worth the money.  The color rendition was superb and the level of detail in the images is astounding.

The Prints: The web doesn't do these photos justice.  I've had most of these photos turned into 8x12 prints.  The results are better than I ever could have hoped.  The colors are vibrant, and the near life-size portraits draw you into the each person's story.  (If you're one of my colleagues, just ask me to see the album sometime.)

Artist's Disclosure:  I didn't have a lot of control over the lighting conditions, so I just made do with what I found.  As a result, some of the images weren't initially viable, and required additional adjustments beyond standard darkroom practices.  Specifically, two images are substantially altered.  Image 9392 (row 1, col 3) has had a pale blue sky added, to avoid distracting the viewer from the subject.  Image 9416 (row 3, col 4) has had special adjustments (dodging and burning) to allow proper exposure of both the foreground and background.

Here's the Video version, courtesy of YouTube: The music is by Caedmon's Call, Share the Well album.


Camera: Canon 10D.  Canon 17-40L lens