Migrant workers village // street photography from Guangzhou

I went to another one of the many migrant worker villages yesterday to shoot some more street photography. These villages are very characteristic and have their very own identity and the life in here is so different from the modern lifestyle with Starbucks and highrises that is makes for great pictures I think. We had a great outing! I wanted to focus on the people this time, and thankfully a lot of the people we met actually agreed to be taken pictures of – which is not that common, mostly they don’t want to be in the pictures, they rather want to take pictures of us – the strange foreigners. But it turns out they are quite friendly if you just smile and say ni hao, and try to communicate even with a very limited Chinese.

I have a lot of pictures to edit still, so this is just a first little showing, of a lovely couple out for a stroll. I am doing a black and white set this time, using gradient map, which I think is the best way to get a nice conversion to black and white, a lot better than raw conversion and desaturating the colors. Just add a gradient map adjustment layer, double click the gradient editor, and adjust the black and white arrows until you have suitable sharpness and colors.