About the Image(s)

This is a silhouette of one of five priests participating in the nightly Aarti ceremony on the west shore of the Ganges in late March this year. I had not noticed this photo until the last month and decided it was worth working with. I ran it through Lightroom for basic lighting and cropping then imported it into PhotoShop. I used Topaz AI’s super focus. I dodged the flowers and the metal on the smoke pot to bring them out a bit and reduced the highlights on the smoke to reduce its glare. This priest was probably 12 feet from us so there was cropping but it was not drastic. No substitute for being close to your subject/ The priests are on a low-platform with all their equipment such as the smoke pot on a flat area in one of the ghats (steps) about 40 feet up from the river. We had front row seats in a roped-off area that held about 90 people and there were thousands of Hindus around us on shore and on boats on the Ganges. I immediately sense somebody had some pull to get us prime seats and it turned out it was the Indian travel agency that our travel agent in Chicago had found.

Equipment
Nikon Z-72 Z28-57 f/2.8 at 60 mm. f/5.6 1/1000th ISO 1600. I almost always shoot in manual and make the adjustments.