Photo Hunt 2015     ... sorta ...

  I went wandering downtown Boston with a couple of participants involved in one of Chrysta Rae's "photography scavenger hunts".  [No convenient link, it's some kind of google-plus thing.]  It was wikkid cold and windy, but we went and trudged around some of downtown, the North End, and a bit of Southie looking for good photogenic material.  I wasn't in it to materially participate in the Hunt; just to be a brain extension of the others as needed.  Along the way I took a few shots of my own, including amusing ones with the participants going after their various targets, but some to be artsy on my own.

Each shot is presented as the "original", simply reduced a bit, next to the "processed" version as I would personally treat it in post.  Every small image links to its own larger full-detail version.  The side-by-side layout should show the differences in cropping, brightness and color treatment, and any other basic parameters that might have been changed in the postprocessing pass.

We didn't cover a whole lot of ground; for an example of a more extensively touristy "Boston blitz" by someone visiting, try this. Still, it had been a while since I went out to just to capture stuff with a camera; this was a fun way to spend an afternoon.  I think we even got a bit of sunburn, or maybe it was wind burn...


Original Processed
The rotunda ceiling in the Quincy Market building.  Just a bit of brightness balance between top and bottom, over a very diffuse selection.  Not a shot I'd normally take, really, as there are tons of other peoples' pix of the same thing floating around.

Original Processed
I spotted these rows of entertainingly bright lighting fixture shades in one of the side galleries.  With the inclusion of the cupola visible through the skylights and the bright pink hat, it became more of an Art Shot.  Restroom sign shadow line also corrected down to de-emphasize it some.

Original Processed
Blocks of ice left over from some kind of St. Patty's Day sculpture, cast aside at the edge of one of the open plazas.  Possibly presented a nice texture study from the melting patterns, with the downtown buildings in the background.  Punched up the blue levels in the ice a little for extra coldness, that was about it.

Original Processed
While finding the loo in the basement of Faneuil Hall, I came across these copper water-drainage structures built on top of some steps underneath basement-level exit doors in Faneuil Hall itself, with lots of typical corrosion in the runoff patterns.  Apparently it was easier to construct these than fix the doors and/or the leakage path that's bringing the water in.

Original Processed
Don't ask why I bothered to shoot this: orts of the spinach-pie sort of thing and its packaging that one of the participants grabbed from one of the many the food vendors in the market.  Suffice to say it was a short exercise in making the drab seem a little less drab, with the "whiteness" and general contrast pushed up a bit.

Original Processed
One of my own pet themes: snow melt patterns, where snowbanks with southern exposure tend to form directional "fingers" around where various bits of dirt melt in driven by incident sunlight.  I've gotten better ones before; compare to this one from a Maine roadtrip a few years back.

Original Processed
Various rounded surfaces on and near the Rowes Wharf building: some from deliberate architectural decisions, and some from the barrel distortion that my point-n-shoot lens gave me at full zoom-out.  Didn't really capture the halo effect of the sun just behind the top of the building.

Original Processed
Ceiling of a for-rent waterfront pavilion near Rowes, decorated with triangles of brightly colored fabric.  But straight-up from the center of the floor, there isn't that much to see.

    Meta:   crew shots

Original Processed
Hunt participants considering the aesthetic merit of the lights around the Faneuil complex.  Needed a bit of "de-harshing" as most full-sunlight shots do.


Original Processed
Shooting labyrinth details.  I liked the "lone small human" aspect of the wide shot here; puts things in perspective.  As with most against-the-sun shots, it needed quite a bit of post-fixing to recover darker detail, and I managed to pull a bit more saturation out of the otherwise very drab grass.

Original Processed
The "drip catcher" off the end of a wavy pavilion roof on the Greenway was of interest.

Original Processed
Getting silly near the Childrens Museum, in a "reflections of buildings" thematic fashion.  The crop conveniently gets rid of a lot of the obvious barrel distortion; I was trying to do this one-handed and couldn't zoom in after powering up.

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