I just returned from Nashville, Tennessee, for the Professional Photographers of America annual convention. I attended classes on marketing, posing, and keeping myself creative. Whenever I visit a new city, I like to go out and see what I can create with my camera. I had some extra time late afternoon on Saturday, so I went down to music row to see all the honkytonks. I was there from about an hour before sunset to an hour after. Some people call this the golden hour of light. When the outside light dims, the city’s neon lights grow brighter. Around 5000 other people had the same idea. In Nashville, there is a four-block area lined with bars and people. I am always interested in visually finding things in places like this, and I found a guitar player perfectly centered in a window playing to the crowd inside. I call this photograph “Music City USA.” The blue effect in the guitar player comes from color temperature and some work on my part. There was stage lighting inside the club with a particular color temperature, and then the exterior lighting was another color temperature. Usually, I would try to get these two color temperatures to be the same, but here I like their opposite effect. My camera tried to correct the color temperature for the outside lighting, which left the interior lighting shifted to the blue side. In my post-production work, I did enhance this effect. Blue and yellow are opposite colors but complementary to each other. I also liked the layering of the neon lights and signs in the window reflection. But the blue guitar player was what drew me to this image.
You can see more of my fine art photographs at ClearyFineArtPhoto.com.