My work: the Fishy Header

Meanwhile, I'm going to blog a little about the header for this template.

One of the things that makes living in Saigon so special is that the streets are so full of people doing things. You probably think this is normal, but if you grow up in a place like Vancouver, where everyone drives everywhere and no one sells anything on the street, it's special, believe me. This is what a street in Vancouver looks like. Nice. Neat. Clean. Boring! Where the hell do you get a bowl of mi? Where are all the people? Where's the life?

So I was going for a stroll down in district 1 with my trusty camera at the ready. I walked down that small street that has a market on it, that leads out onto Ham Ngi, near that famous Banh Mi store and I started taking pictures.

It's not a very big market, but there's this crazy, huge tree growing right up out of the roof of a clothes stall.

Anyway... I got to the fish sellers area and noticed there were a whole load of live fish swimming around in plastic buckets. So I started taking pictures of them. I wasn't really interested in getting a good picture of a fish, because there wasn't enough light and they were all moving around in the water. But I liked the way the colour of the buckets reflected into the water, and the way the fish moved around, making a kind of abstract moving piece of art.

The bubbles in particular made the whole think look like a crazy lava lamp. I started getting frustrated with the light, there wasn't enough to allow my autofocus mode on my camera to focus. But after a bit, I got used to that, and just started enjoying the weirdness of it all. Here's the photo that I cropped and, after a little messing around with photoshop, became the header for this blog.



As you can see, I cropped it to get a nice horizontal slice, and then I fooled around with the levels setting in photoshop, making it darker, and getting the red even deeper. Then I overlayed it with a black to transparent gradient and set the gradient layer to "multiply".