X100 ....... Red

I love Steve Huff's excellent website for his interesting reviews, comments and video clips which mostly happen to be on equipment that I like. The only niggle I have is that I am never that impressed with his test photos (or most of the others for that matter) although I have to say that his more serious work on the recent Seal tour was excellent. Having said that I really liked his recent  X100 Filmstrip post in which he pointed out how well the X100 handled color and in particular, red. This inspired me to have a go on this theme myself and I found some nice red themed subjects on a recent long weekend trip to Bali.

I find personally that strong red can be a dangerous color and is best used where it appears with more dominant monotones or alone as in the lead flower photo (incidentally, I was tempted to change the orientation of this shot but felt it looked like the flower was shedding a tear so left it alone) The above shot from a statue in Bali shows this to good effect. Like all of the shots in this short post I processed it in the lovely little Snapseed app on my Ipad. This is a simply marvelous app for use on the road and I will write a separate post on combining it with the X100, coming soon. Back to the statue shot, I processed this in the 'drama' tool in the app and selected 'dark 2' which exaggerated the contrast of the whites and blacks very nicely and the red flower just adds that extra touch of color interest to bring the shot alive. This for me is a nice discreet use of this powerful color.

Here is a slightly more conventional use of it, again on a contrasty monotone subject. I avoided the mega contrast effect of the last shot as there wasn't enough inherent black and white on the statue itself so I felt this more discreet handling worked better.

Finally, back to the 'drama tones' for the final shot and you can see how the app has changed the natural hue of the red flowers unlike the natural tone of the first image. The benefit here though is that the water droplets get exaggerated and I think the photo gains something from this albeit highly inaccurate rendition of the tones and colors. Again though, I find this works because the red is a block and not dominating or fighting with other colors.

Hope this was interesting and I think its worth using little projects like this to make you focus on a particular theme or subject. I know I had fun searching out nice reds on this trip.

For those that are interested, I found the red flowers in the wonderful butterfly garden in Singapore's Changi international airports Terminal 3. Make sure you have a look when you are there next, its a great location.

That's it for this post, back soon with some more on the interesting Snapseed app, in the meantime keep working the X100 and have a go at a project.

Steel