Cross-Processing Dubai

Submitted by Vishal on Sat, 2010/04/17 - 3:17am

Two Camels - cross-processed in the GIMP

Of late I've been trying to take more photos of the country I live in. After 12+ years of living here, and coming from a place like India that is infinitely more visually chaotic, it becomes a bit of an effort to keep boredom from setting in. I can't say I'm taking better photos here now than perhaps I ever did, and I still yearn for a place that isn't just desert and buildings and malls, but I'm trying.

Recently I finally looked into this whole cross-processing look I've always liked, and how to introduce them into my own photos. After appying the knowledge of a few tutorials and a couple of GIMP plugins and scripts (including my favourite GEGL C2G method) I've come up with these.

They're all a bit over the top -- nobody said Indians were subtle and I am, in that regard at least, 100% desi -- but I do like the strangeness the techniques bring to otherwise bland, brown and grey photos of the UAE. Here's six more examples.

Old Town in Downtown Dubai - cross-processed
Dubai Desert - cross-processed
Old Town Building textures - cross-processed
Dubai Outer Bypass Road - cross-processed
Sharjah Market Dome - cross-processed(Okay, I lied in the title -- this one above is actually in Sharjah)
Burj Khalifa - cross-processed

V

Comments

What about people?

Submitted by Sourav Roy on Sat, 2010/04/17 - 6:51am.

Love the skies and the desert one. What about people? Are the resistant to being photographed? Or you don't shoot people?

In Dubai I try not to shoot

Submitted by Vishal on Sat, 2010/04/17 - 12:01pm.

In Dubai I try not to shoot people. Emaratis and Arabs in general are resistant to it, and even having a camera pointed in their general direction can cause offence. Sure, eight out of ten times you can get away with it, but mostly I don't want to bother, and it's not advisable. This probably has something to do with being a perpetually stubbled and unkempt brown man, which, like it or not, does work against you sometimes.

PP awesomeness

Submitted by Amit Suvarna on Sat, 2010/04/17 - 8:01am.

Woah! Most of these pictures look awesome. I really love the treatment of the sky. That hint of blue-green is all consuming without being distracting.

Thanks! I think I forgot to

Submitted by Vishal on Sat, 2010/04/17 - 12:10pm.

Thanks! I think I forgot to mention in the post itself that most of the basic stuff is down to one tutorial, i.e. this one

Specifically you need to do Step 3, the colour curves bit. The rest of the tutorial also works, but for these I just duplicated the original image, colour curved the bottom layer, GEGL C2Ged the top, set the top to Overlay and played with the bottom's lightness/saturation and the top's opacity until it looked right. Fairly simple.

just lovely ***

Submitted by deathkitty on Sat, 2010/04/17 - 7:59pm.

vibrant lonely potent and strangely erotic in a desert nomad fierce sort of way

Thank you! Nothing connected

Submitted by Vishal on Thu, 2010/04/22 - 12:37pm.

Thank you! Nothing connected to me has ever been described as 'strangely erotic' before. :)