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The Year Of The Horse
31 January 2014
In a multi-ethnic city, there is no shortage of celebrations. You get to enjoy, for example, more than one new year every year. As it happens, we've just turned the page to Chinese New Year, the Year of the Horse.
El Cid's Horse. Casio EX-Z750 at f6.9 and 1/200 second with Alien Skin Light brushed paper border.
Our 2005 image of Anna Hyatt Huntington's sculpture of El Cid at the Legion of Honor is cropped to focus on the horse. We don't much miss El Cid ourselves, although we thought a graceful fade of the crop using an Alien Skin border makes the crop work a bit better. We do like the powerful beast clearing the trees, standing on a rise overlooking the future. The tides, the shore, the fog all evoke the unseen, the unknown.
As one Chinese astrologist puts it, "The Horse is an individual, who depends only on their own wits and labor to get what they want."
The Casio wasn't much for image quality (which doesn't matter much here at only 500 pixels). Still, this is a significant crop of the original, which was taken inside the Legion's columns. The camera did capture tone and color well enough to render the scene's drama.
We ran the JPEG through Photoshop CC using the Camera Raw filter to minimize chromatic aberration and kick up the micro-contrast. We lightened the shadows a bit more with the Curves tool, too. And used Smart Sharpen to chisel the details.
So once again, Happy New Year!