Hoxton, East London | Canon EOS R : RF 35mm f1.8 IS : f/13.0 : 1/125s : ISO 1600
Shop window mannequins can sometimes take on an eerie quality. This was certainly the case in this shop window in Hoxton. I cannot remember the exact business carried out in the store, it was likely a hairdresser, but I could not be sure. The almost robotic look of the lined up mannequins provided an almost monochrome image even before converting the image to black and white. In some ways, the shot reminds me of a still taken from a street scene of Blade Runner, or so I would like to think.
This was not a difficult shot to take. I had plenty of time and technically the shot offered little in the way of challenges. In post-processing, however, I worked hard to accentuate the macabre look and feel allowing many areas in the window to fall to black. I used Silver Effex extensively during the processing, removing many of the mid-tones allowing the shadows and a few highlights to dominate.
In the original RAW file seen here, the reflections were too dominant within the image. I did not have a polarising filter at the time and so used a number of post-processing techniques to dampen down the shadows. In particular the dehaze and clarity filters within Adobe Camera Raw and a luminosity mask to reduce the intensity of a few specific highlights
