Phoneography weekly: Waterloo Street (四马路)

Bright colours of the Indian temple along Waterloo Street, next to Kwan Im Temple. Colour saturation and brightness adjusted in Snapseed.

Phoneography Monday Challenge: Street Photography
Apps used: Camera+, Snapseed, VSCOcam
Right next door to the Kwan Im Temple (in last week’s Phoneography Weekly post) on Waterloo Street sits an Indian Temple. I was rather amused to see a Chinese urn in front of it, totally unexpected and hence the picture.

Opposite the Indian temple, a cluster of brightly-coloured metal dividers are stacked, providing a comfortable place to roost for pigeons. I was attracted to the pigeons because there were so many sitting on the dividers. The dividers were brightly coloured in primary blue, red and yellow so I thought that would make an interesting colour shot. But the background turned out too busy. While I tried to take the subject from various angles walking around the bunch of dividers, I found that it was more effective to render the image in black and white to focus on the shapes rather than the colour.

The second picture was largely edited in Snapseed. I had applied a retro filter which gave the black and white it’s vignette effect. While one could make out the form of the pigeons, they do not show up as well against the busy background.

 
The third picture was filtered in VSCOcam. This particular filter removes dark shadows (you can compare #2 and #3), #3 comprise of grey gradients, no darker grey or black. Strangely, I like a lot of other people’s photos that had use this effect,  but I hardly use it on my own photos because I always preferred mine to look sharp and vibrant.

 
There were volunteers selling flags or stickers for charity along Waterloo Street that day. So here’s an irrelevant photo of the flags and our silly dog… doing her thing.