Tomato Man, Kaka’ako Farmers Market – Honolulu, Hawaii

I’m wrapping up my coverage of the Kaka’ako Farmers Market with a real farmer. At least, I assume so, given that all he had on display was tomatoes. I didn’t want to imply that this market only had prepared food.

As I recall, they had other vegetables too, and possibly meat. However, since we were on vacation and weren’t cooking, the basics didn’t attract our attention. However, a man in front of a sea of red was photographically provoking. Of course, you can’t see that because of the black and white conversion — something I often do for my street photographs.

Talking about black and white conversions, I once found them challenging to post-process. I’ve talked about this photo before. It’s the first image I ever successfully transformed into a satisfying monochrome, shot back in 2009. A proper black and white photo is not just the absence of color — you just can’t desaturate an image and get a good look.

Much of the heavy lifting is done with Capture One presets these days, but I still tweak them afterward. For this image, I opted to darken the tomatoes. I adjusted the filter to darken reds for a more visual punch. Without that, the tomatoes looked rather anemic.

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