graffiti

I felt like posting a bit of bold colour today. This is yet another shot from the Czech capital, I will get round to posting more local shots soon ,I promise :-D

Again, not a lot to say about it , other than I love design, graphics and graffiti and this fits the bill. Stencils seem to be all the rage at the moment , what with the popularity of 'tha notorious' Banksy .

Something I discovered whilst processing this image is that I have been double sharpening my images, which has been causing a slightly crunchy look. I had been wondering why other sites pictures had a crisper look and now i've found out why.

I had been reducing my images from the master file using image resize and setting the filter as 'bicubic sharper - best for reduction' , then running smart sharpen. I did some tests and what i found was reducing the image size using regular 'bilinear' then running the smart sharpen produced much nicer results. Needless to say I am hastily reprocessing my shots as we speak.

Care to share your experience with sharpening techniques?

As a 'yoof' of the 80's i was really into Hip Hop and, naturally, graffiti too. Tagging trains , walls, anything, went hand in hand with the music. Now in my 30's rather than tagging walls i'm going about taking pictures of other people's tags on walls. This 'piece' happens to be in Prague's old town, i still love the fonts that people use for tags, the chunky text..."ah the smell of aerosol...", now where did i leave that marker pen?

Anyway, about the shot,i thought i'd give the black and white shots a rest for a while. This one i really like just for the simple shape and text against the plain background of the wall. Compositionally the sloping floor bugs me a little bit as it interferes with the clean look of the shot, but i didn't want to crop any tighter so that's the compromise, if you're reading this and care to comment let me know what you think?