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To quite literally no one’s surprise, my last write-up warranted another study that instead shifts its focus onto my post-processing methods and philosophies. As a conclusion from last time, looking at my raw shooting processes has taught me two main bullet points about myself. One of which was that I still see and tend to gravitate towards warmer settings and subjects, and aside from the fact that we humans are conditioned to prefer warmer hues instead of cooler ones, I was still able to detect warmth in the world and find beauty and comfort in the warm occurrences that happen constantly around my life. It is just quite fascinating to rediscover that I still have that ability to pick them out, even after all the recent trauma I was unfortunate enough to have accrued. What came by complete surprise to me was that, I had an instinctual feeling that my world and outlook towards life had gone through a blackout of some sort amidst the process of me treading through incredibly dark and damp water currents of life. Up until now, reflecting at face value, I do observe my outlook on life, humanity, and society in general to be very bleak. But I guess through the previous analysis, it is evident that the bleakness is only relative, and that my perspective on life was just a tiny bit darker, but the truth is that it is still extremely warm, comforting, and at the forefront of it all, trusting. At the end of the day, from my analysis and further extensive and comprehensive reflection, I still trust humanity and the beauty of my surroundings, and it does show through my truest and most vulnerable artistic practice of communicating with myself about the world around me - photography. Even though I set out to photograph urban pockets of solitude and loneliness, and even though it is still the overarching theme of what I was attempting to communicate to viewers of my art about, it is clear that I still find those solitude pockets very warming and endearing. There is something inherently beautiful about individual bubbles of lonely humans traversing through this world of coexistence together, and the endless encounters of bubbles coming across each other, and if their energies match up, would merge with one another and creating bigger and warmer bubbles, and this cycle would go on until forever.
Okay… I have to digress. Onto the main point of this writeup.
With the risk of repeating myself for the sake of including enough information similar to the last write-up I made regarding my raw shooting practices, every single pixel within the file contains 3 values as mentioned above, hue, saturation, and brightness. The convention I’m used to for HSB recordings is each value being stored for brightness and saturation out of 256 (unsigned 8-bit binary integers), and the value for hue being stored out of 360 (the color wheel being a full circle). With most programming languages that I know, the values for saturation and brightness are represented as a range from 0 to 255, and the value for hue is represented as a range from 0 to 359. This time around, my approach of importing the files through Python and utilizing the OpenCV library to manipulate HSB, this is mostly the case. The only difference lies in the hue value, due to the nature of OpenCV also wanting to store the hue value with unsigned 8-bit integers for the sake of efficiency and uniform convention, the maximum value of 359 cannot be reached, and thus the implemented workaround was to divide the inherent pixel hue (0 to 359) value by 2, and thus the maximum available hue for any given pixel is 179 (from 0° to 179°, 180° wraps back around to 0°).
I want to use Python to explore my post-processing photographic eye and go through my photos by album, and by shoot, since that would give me good estimated answers to the questions I have above for each time period within my photography career. It is also a good approach to track how my preferences in color grading and editing practices change over time, and how they are affected by the events and occurrences that have happened around my life.
Importing my album of edited photos into Python into a NumPy array, and using OpenCV to read the RGB array into an HSV color space, we get an array of arrays, each sub-array containing 3 values representing each of the HSB values that are the essential building blocks to create every single one of the millions of pixels for each post-processed image.
With that philosophy, I wanted to isolate and represent each of these building blocks to stand alone by themselves - hue, saturation, and brightness. With this approach, I can attempt to analyze my artistic eye down to each element in terms of color, lighting, and composition. I will include each of the three collages on these elements below.
NOTE: Work in progress, still a work in progress. I am writing this still, if someone happens to see this before I officially publish this…