Gritty Tenderloin

Gritty Tenderloin

The view out of the window of my apartment where I lived in the Tenderloin in San Francisco. With a dramatic sky, and a bit of post-processing — graduated exposure-lowering filter, and some separate lowering of exposure — we end up with this picture.

It strikes me as gritty. It's the kind of picture I expect to see from a south-american city with pollution problems and favelas hidden behind the big tourist hotels. Façades that once were bright and cheery now look droopy with the colour faded in different amounts for different patches. Towering housing with speckled balconies filled with things.

The grimness of the picture is aided by the darkened sky, by the way that the tops of the high houses are drawn in with the graduated filter, and thus darkening towards the top, and by the sharpness of the image, in which all the flaws reproduced faithfully.