This is kind of how I feel about mad holiday shopping.

I like a good crowd. There’s a sort of inherent or at least potential madness in a large number of people densely occupying a given space. Right about now, that would be the phenomenon at your average shopping center in the United States. The naked materialism is off-putting and even disheartening, but the Black Friday and whatever they call today’s Saturday and tomorrow’s Sunday shopping pilgrimage is a cultural phenomenon. I kind of like to be in it as far as I have little to nothing to do with the actual shopping. As a bonus, I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of photo opportunities, too. It’s not my milieu, but I’m tempted. As of this writing, I’m going with avoiding the madness however.

Regarding the photo, oven fan switches are the kind of things that creep into my photo archive when the fall and winter push out more appealing subjects. The corroded dial was a bit blown out, which you can still see, especially in comparison to the reflection, but on the plus side the pitch black background made it easy to tone that down some. The solid black meant I didn’t have to worry about mismatched fringes. By selecting only the small area the dial was in, I created a second layer from that selection and used the “Multiply” mode to enhance the color and repair the highlights that weren’t fully blown out. The layer opacity allows an adjustment for the amount with this technique. I used around 50% in this case.