Matchbox Houses. Soweto, 2012.
by Audio Landscapes
Earning the nickname from their simple design, these houses grid Soweto’s “middle class” neighborhoods, a marginal economic notch above the more haphazard shabeens, or tin-roofed shacks. I made several images from the Oppenheimer Tower, a good vantage to survey the varying townships of this uniquely historic locale. This frame in particular appealed to me because at the time of photographing, I knew immediately that a tilt-shift effect would work well to exemplify the matchbox simplicity of the colorful homes. It was early afternoon with high sun and partially overcast, so color and light were problematic. I intentionally overexposed by 3/4 stop and lowered contrast in-camera to keep shadow detail and later augmented color using a Lab color action I built into Photoshop CS5, overdoing the color to heighten the miniturization effect you see here. Also in PS, employing the gradient tool to create a mask and then apply lens blur to all of the areas beyond the road and first row of homes involved some trial and error but I finally achieved what you see here, save for the road, which was still too blurry. Note, whenever I modify an image in PS, I always maintain the original, unmodified on the bottom layer in the event I want to later experiment with different techniques. In this case, I thought I’d achieve more impact by erasing the blur on the top image to sharpen the road and a few window frames of the subject houses. For me this draws greater interest along the road and makes the person standing next to the truck appear as a stick figure. Overall, I think the effect works to exemplify the matchbox house style of this interesting Soweto neighborhood.
Happy 2012!
Excellent application of the technique. Great angle which makes this very convincing. Nice work!
Yep, great work, I love that! Good luck