Fresh Eyes New Inspiration Part IV - Blanket Man

You can see Fresh Eyes New Inspiration:
Part I - Landscapes here
Part II - Curtis Falls here
Part III - Alpine Skeletons here

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From Part I:

One of the great things about digital photography is that you can process your 'negatives' as many times as you like. You aren't stuck with the one interpretation that you baked in the first time. Likewise, due to the ease of revisiting old images (if you've sorted and stored them correctly), a fresh set of eyes can lead to new inspiration.

Recently I've been optimising my image collection by removing genuine rubbish, and renaming and shifting things around to make storage and retrieval easier in the future. And this has given me the chance to revisit old images that I might have previously ignored, or that I might have seen some potential in but couldn't bring a vision to fruition at the time. And perhaps this says something about my life, but I get inordinate pleasure in discovering a hidden beauty in an old forgotten image. It's kind of like finding a treasure in amongst the trash of a second-hand shop.

The finished image

The image that I have found new inspiration in for this part is a shot of an old man in India that I originally processed in black and white. In general I like black and white for street work, and particularly for these old weathered guys in India. The character-full faces and wiry beards/hair often suit a black and white look. Here's the original black and white processing I did on this image:

I'm currently in the process of reorganising my website and when reviewing this image for inclusion, I wondered how it might look in colour. On checking out the original capture, I felt straight away that this black and white version is too tightly cropped. It cuts out a lot of the interesting pattern in the image (the bricks behind, and the blanket he is wearing). And in colour, both the bricks and blanket gain another point of interest. Particularly the blanket as the colourful nature of it is a nice juxtaposition against the old weathered face and turban.

And to finish the image off, I applied a film simulation preset from VSCO. Their simulations are done so well, and they really complement street images.

Here's the final image again

I hope you enjoyed this spark of inspiration, and as always you can find more of my images on instagram, my website and here on my blog.