Travel Photography | London | Playing With The Tone

© 2009 Wazari Wazir | Travel Photography | London

The photograph above were taken in 2009 during my long transit in London to Santiago Chile from Kuala Lumpur, it was a long haul journey and very long transit here, 12 hours of transit in London. I manage to get out of the airport and a have a walk around Paddington.

I don’t want to talk much about London here since it was almost two years since my “transit” here, instead I want to talk about color tone or the result that we can get by playing with Tone in Photoshop. I want to talk about my Photoshop Tone eBook here. Some people still get confuse by it. Some people still wanted to know how many tones are there. Actually I don’t sell the tone but what you can found out in my photoshop tone eBook is a tutorial about how to get the tone.

The are many ways to get the tone in Photoshop and there is no right or wrong way to get the result but the best result is always the fastest one. I mean the shortest one to get the Tone will always the best. The good thing about playing with the tone is that, you will never get the same result even though almost thousand of people have already bought my eBook. The reason is this, the tone will vary depending on the lighting condition in the original Photograph, sometimes color temperature of the original photograph also will have an effect to final product.

The temperature in London, Tokyo or Istanbul is different than than the one that we have here in Malaysia, we are tropical country and we have our very own temperature, that’s why even though we try use the same technique that someone from Russia use for his editing, we will never be able to get the same effect, maybe closer but will almost impossible to get 100% same tone or effect. I don’t think I will get the same color tone like above if I applied the editing to one of my Kuala Lumpur picture. I will get the tone but will never match those London picture above.

Why I’m adding the tone on the above picture is that, I want to add mood to the photograph above, it was drizzle when we took  a stroll there, it was nit too dark but gloomy and I like the “situation” there. I believe if i strip those tone the mood will be gone, the picture will feel different. This kind of tone will definitely not suitable for Photojournalism or Editorial work where they prefer the picture to be original. I’ve no problem with that, if someone contact me and they want to buy the picture above minus the tone, I can always send them the original copy without any editing.

This is my personal blog and whatever or whichever way I wanted to present my work is personally my own decision. This is me and this is what I like it to be presented. Some people like to lay with HDR, ROL or Ray of Light, some people like to play with Photo Manipulation, Dave Hill kind of style. Personally for me as long as it’s personal, we should try to enjoy what the photographers want to share with us, it’s their style, it’s their work, if we don’t like it just move on, look for another beautiful roses somewhere. Some people don’t like square format picture like what I like to do, I don’t have a problem with that, I don’t have the obligation to satisfy everybody but myself. It’s good to have an attitude and it’s good to have our personal representation of our work, that’s the only way people can recognize us from thousand or maybe million of photographers out there. Be unique, be bold, be yourself.