Bob,
I think perhaps I should return the favour and offer a comment on your candid shot of the tattooed ..errh.. lady.
First I should mention that I have my own prejudices and a slight prejudice against tattooed people is one of them. I simply don't understand the desire of anyone who wants to be tattooed, if it's permanent. I suspect the tattoos in this shot are not permanent, but one can't be sure. One can't even be sure if the subject's a lady or a bloke.
It's a candid shot of a documentary nature and also a bit of a freak show. Because I don't understand the motivation for this sort of thing, I would have preferred to see the whole person.
It's interesting for sure, but I can't say I actually like the image. It sort of reminds me of a potentially nice shot of a bunch of flowers with dying petals that have not been removed.
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Actually it's not tattoos, it's henna.
The woman was a quite beautiful Indian bride who was visiting the Rama Sita temple in Orchha. Her (probably) sisters and friends had spent hours decorating her hands and feet with elaborate patterns using henna paste which temporarily dyes the skin.
And notice that she has adopted the red and white bangles which indicate her status as a married woman. No longer will she be free to pick among the multitude of interesting colors.
As for the dying petals, yes, they are dying. Old fashioned roses that don't hold up well after cutting. The petals were cascading from her adornment and I failed to capture the movement, but froze them in time.
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That said, I share your dislike for tattoos, or at least a lack of understanding why people would do that to their bodies. I'm of an age that when I became old enough to do something like that to myself I frequently saw the military guys who had come back from WWII with their dancing girls, hearts, etc. And those most likely once nicely done decorations had degraded to something that looked more like an angry bruise.
I suppose that in the next decade or so we'll have a not-so-expensive and less-painful-than-what-we-have-now way of removing tattoos.
But more than that I wonder what the next generation will have to do to establish it's rebel-ness?
As a school kid of the '50s we tweaked the establishment with our flattops and then went on to offend by wearing sneakers rather than proper shoes.
In our second childhood of the sixties we grew our hair and quit shaving. We wore the strangest clothing that we could scrounge.
Later generations have moved on to electrically colored hair, piercing, tattoos, and even a bit of branding (yes, the cattle type).
The next generation, what's left for them?
Amputations?
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Now all that OT stuff aside - how about some help here....
Why does the same shot look different on two different sites? The one that displays here is darker than where I originally posted it here on [a href=\"http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Asia/India/Central/photo3203.htm]Trek Earth[/url].