Tag: black and white

No Color Here

 

Morning Flower, Color

Putzing around with a lot of my images, taken over the years, and all in color, I am looking for ones that I think might look work in black and white. I am looking, analyzing texture and lighting, and then making a conversion to black and white. Mostly I fail.

What I am trying to do is to train my eyes to be able to visualize a picture in black and white before I take it. Given our world is filled with color, I find this especially hard to do. Awhile ago someone told me that people who are color blind in one area or another make great black and white photographers because they do not have the ability to see all the normal range. While I don’t know if this is true or not, I do know that “seeing” in black and white is very difficult for me!

When I first looked at this color picture, it immediately stood out. The original exposure was very dark – underexposed to the point that only the bright white light of the flower stood out. I increased its exposure in LR and saw that it had potential because of the contrast in light and dark. Leaf textures and fine hairs on stems and buds also caught my eye.

Morning Flower

 

I popped it into Silver Efex, and scanned through it. Finally I chose the preset I liked best, and went to work a bit. I increase fine texture, used control points, and then returned to LR for final vignetting and detail enhancement. Last steps were in CS6 for some spot removal and a signature. The end result is not too bad, in my opinion.

Please, Have a Seat

Please, Have a Seat

I am going through some older photos, looking at color and deciding if they might be good in black and white. This one caught my eye because it has some obvious contrast in color, but also a variety of textures. Contrast and texture are some of the things which, so I read, help make a black and white image worthwhile. I am trying to train my eyes to see this – for me, this is especially hard as color is always my first observation. Oh, what a beautiful red! Texture and tones are not something I find easy to discern, either because of my magpie mind, or maybe because my eye is untrained this way. Since I am using some black and white film in an old camera, I want to see if I can do it without taking a lot of sludgy pictures.