Before
After
One of my retirement resolutions was that I would visit all the museums in Santa Fe. Nearly two years on I thought it was about time I got started. Plus, I needed somewhere more interesting than my neighborhood to test drive the new Canon EOS M. So when I learned the International Folk Art Museum allowed photographs but not flash or tripods I thought “Great, I can see how the little camera does at high ISO’s.” Well, it was dark in that museum and I ended up having to crank the ISO up to 6400 to get any kind of reasonable shutter speeds, even wide open. Yes, the pictures are a little noisy at full size but for this image I think a small intimate print is the way to go anyway.
I liked the image of the Kokeshi dolls out of the camera but it was a little hazy from shooting through a glass display box and the background was a little boring too. So, I took the dolls into Nik and added a detail extractor, a bleach by-pass filter, which to my surprise really took care of the hazyness, and a brilliance warmth filter to bring out the colors.
It happened that they had a display of Japanese kites going and I had photographed them and really liked the bright colors but could not see how I could use them as a stand alone photograph. Then I wondered if I could take a piece of the colorful kite and use it as a background for the dolls. So I cropped out a piece of the kite and resized it to the size of the doll image. Then I brought it in as a layer and masked out the dolls. It took a bit of work, especially around the edges but I like the result and now I feel like I have created my own art and not just photographed that of someone else.