Photo by Andrew Turner

COPPER’S CONUNDRUM

Early evening rushhour in the city of Xi’an, China, 2009/05/08 with a policeman trying (and failing) to control chaotic vehicle and pedestrian traffic. I watched the scene for a while, with the traffic officer cutting a rather forlorn figure locked in the central triangle formed by the vehicles. I snapped a series of shots with a Nikon D700 and a 24 – 120 mm lens, finally choosing the one submitted because of its composition of diagonals and triangles.

Author: Andrew Turner, West Byfleet, Surrey, UK

Editing notesI used On1 Photo RAW MAX 2025 to process the raw image, setting the starting tone in the Develop Module with Brilliance AI. Using On1 Standard profile, I slightly tweaked the white balance to increase the image warmth. I applied NoNoise as well as Tack Sharp 2024 and left the lens correction at the default value. I used keystone correction in the Transform module to correct verticals, since the image was taken from an upper floor in the hotel. In the local tab I adjusted the highlights and structure sliders to make the image "pop" In the Effects tab I added a Dynamic Contrast filter, a Glow filter but masked out the centre of the image, a curves filter to adjust the overall contrast, a vignette (Big Softy) to focus the viewer on the policeman, and finally, a border that I would have preferredto be a bit narrower. The total processing time was about 30 minutes.

NIKON D700
ƒ/5
55mm
ISO 200
1/60 sec

COPPER’S CONUNDRUM

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