Tag Archives: silver efex pro

About Black and White Photographs

Posted by enmanscamera on

Sax player

Cups and a mirror

Windows

 

Bronc rider

 

Tree

Sentinal after the fall

One of the fun things I like about photography is the endless conversations I get to have with both long time and beginning photographers, as they explore and re-explore this exciting medium. Last week I talked to photographers that wondered if reverting back to film would help them become more creative. And in the past few days more than one person has stopped by wanting to talk about converting their images to black and white.

When I started out with photography I spent most of my time shooting with B&W. I studied Ansel Adams’ books on his zone system, and Richard Zakia’s writings on tone control, and I read or looked at everything I could find to understand black and white photography and printmaking.

I began to understand exposure as of shades of grey, and got used to thinking about the subjects I photographed in tonal values instead of only bright colours. I remember a trick that one of my photography instructor’s suggested for those students that had trouble “seeing” contrast. He said we should “squint down to f/16 when we looked a subject”. I expect other students on campus wondered about the camera-toting students squinting up at the college’s clock tower after class.

I learned to previsualize, and as I selected my subject I would think about how I would process the film and make the final print. I might adjust the exposure rating and developing, as with the Zone system, and select different papers and alternate chemicals to change contrast or tonal values in the final print. Nowadays I do the same, but think about what I will need to do to enhance my image file with Photoshop.

Modern cameras capture images in colour, but that doesn’t mean we can’t previsualize the outcome; and converting a RAW colour file is really easy with programs like Photoshop, and my favourite, Silver EFex Pro. Converting that image to B&W stretches our creativity and forces us to visualize our world in different terms.

A black and white image is a matter for the eye of the beholder, the intuition, and finally the intellect. Of course colour is all that, but much of the time it seems photographers, overwhelmed by colour, just push the shutter seeing nothing deeper in a scene than the colours. A black and white photograph depends on its ability to communicate; it doesn’t need to rely on eye-catching colours for its visual presentation.

Black and white images don’t attract with a play of colours. To me they are subtle and make viewers think about the picture. The B&W image demands close attention to composition, lighting, perspective, and the context in which the image is shot

A 1950s photographer named Paul Outerbridge, once said, “In black and white you suggest. In color you state.”   And I remember another photographer saying that he believed shooting in B&W refined one’s way of seeing.

I am of the belief that those photographers that are good at black and white photography learn to exploit the differences in tonal elements in a scene and present viewers with successful B&W portrayals that make excellent use of shapes, textures, light and shadow, and the loss of those original colours becomes irrelevant.

For those that haven’t tried B&W image making, converting an image is really easy with programs like Photoshop and Silver Efex. Readers will find a new way of displaying work. Black and white will have readers visualizing the world in new and creative ways and who knows, like me I expect they will enjoy black and white photography.

 

I look forward to comments. Thanks, John

My website is at www.enmanscamera.com

Looking into the Landscape

Posted by enmanscamera on

Landscape photographer Elliot Porter once said, “Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject”.

On the weekend I bundled up against the damp, windy cold and headed down to the frozen shore along the South Thompson River not far from my home. My intention was to photograph the Pritchard Bridge that spanned the river and I had hoped to see large chunks of ice jammed against the pillars.

I like photographing architecture, and any kind of structure, whether it is buildings, fences, and yes, bridges, is just plain fun for me. I look for how the light plays on stone, wood, metal, glass, and any other building material and how it creates shadows and features, like ice, that interact with the structure. However, to my disappointment, the large chunks of ice I had noticed a few days earlier were gone. The strong wind that constantly blew along the river valley must have cleared all the ice from around the bridge pillars.

I wandered along under the bridge looking for interesting angles. I had mounted my camera with a 16-85mm lens thinking that its wide view would give me an interesting perspective.  My intention was to photograph the bridge in a fashion that would look good when converted to black and white. I looked for shadows and highlights that would create enough contrast to give depth and dimensionality to black and white images. Much of the time I see black and white images that have been changed to monotone without regard to the tonality of the subject. All I see are flat tones of black and white with no relationship to the actual colour quality of the full colour original. There are several programs that convert image files to black and white while keeping that tonality, PhotoShop among them, but my preference because of the control and finality is Silver Efex Pro from www.niksoftware.com.

I walked along the shore and crossed under the bridge looking for creative opportunities and trying to find interesting perspectives of the bridge.  Eventually, however, what caught my eye were features protruding from the sand like posts and branches, and I began looking down and along the shore instead of up and that’s when I really started to take pictures that were working for me. There were shells, small bits of water worn wood, a half-buried rusty oil drum, fish skeletons and much more, like an overturned shoe in the sand. I changed lenses to an 18-200mm to have more focal length and a narrower view for ground level shots of posts and other revealed objects sticking up from the sand.

The light was perfect and its low angle created intriguing shadows that added definition to each of the subjects I selected as I walked along the sandy beach. Each small object, in Eliot Porter’s words, had its own “story” and I tried to show something in each that was more than just a snap shot of an object on the beach.

Often we forget that there is more in the landscape than majestic peaks and expanses of fields. I began by ignoring the “tiny subjects” thinking only the bridge would be worth photographing. If this was a garden, then I would immediately contemplate close-up photography and grab my macro lens, but it took me a while to realise how much more there was to photograph on that frozen river beach.  Soon, I will be walking through the sand with my camera again, this time keeping my eye on the ground, and I will be dressed even warmer.

www.enmanscamera.com