Selective Coloring and Haiku

Today’s Post by Mildred Alpern

A gala affair

Wine and champagne flowing free

Tipsy view of art

A photo gallery opening in New York City draws crowds, and when the photographer is Annie Leibovitz, big ones. Lucky enough to secure an invite, I carried an Olympus E-M5 Mark II with the compact Panasonic Lumix 25mm f/1.4 lens, good for low light. Unobtrusive, I was able to get shots of the attendees and of Annie Leibovitz as she spoke about her art in a former women’s correctional facility, the future home of The Women’s Building at 550 West 20th St.

On the computer screen, images of wine and champagne in shapely glasses were intriguing. Their colors gleamed, even more so with a few simple processing tricks—conversion in Photoshop with the black and white adjustment layer and then simple selective coloring, painting the liquids with the brush tool and the color that reveals—black in this case.

Next for fun was creating the haiku, the traditional Japanese three line seventeen syllable, five-seven-five meter literary poem, to accompany the images. Combining image and haiku, two artistic sensibilities, has led to creating Haiku and Images, a self-published book that I give as holiday gifts to friends and relatives.

All images were shot hand held with the Olympus E-M5 Mark II and the Panasonic Lumix 25mm f/1.4 lens. The color image with an exposure of 1/50sec at f/1.4, -1/3EV and ISO 400; the champagne with exposure at 1/10sec at f/1.4 and ISO 400, and the wine at 1/15 sec at f/1.4 and ISO 400.

Mildred’s book Haiku and Images is available on Amazon and is filled wit h beautifully reproduced color photographs along with original haiku underneath, embellishing the image and deepening its meaning. Pick up a copy to give as gift for yourself or a friend.