black and white – Page 87 – Ink, Yarn & Beer

Deep in the Grove

Come into the light, Luke . . .

The other day I picked up a book on black and white photography, specifically John Batdorff’s Black and White: From Snapshot to Great Shot. He mentions using available light. With this in mind, and rather restless as I wait for the afternoon to pass before heading out to a swank party, I wandered around and came across my husband’s shoes on the table. He just polished them.

I used available light, and augmented a bit with some post-processing and on-camera pop-up flash for a few pictures.

As they say, work with what you got.

Looking

There are days, as anyone creative knows, when you “get it” and things come along perfectly. Everything you do feels right, you learn, and all the knowledge you have acquired throughout your lifetime pulls together and you create something you love, feels satisfying, and adds to your ongoing growth as an artist. And then, there are days where anything and everything you do is crap.

My walk around the neighborhood the other day was satisfying. The ants-in-the-pants restlessness was put into action. While I took some pictures I thought were pretty good, it wasn’t until I got home and started playing with some of them in black and white that I began to get a sense of composition in photos. Sure, I know the rule of thirds, etc., but I wasn’t really using it in a way I found meaningful. When I began the post-processing, I began to appreciate some of my photos a bit more, and with some cropping, rotating, contrast enhancement, or whatever, I ended up with a few I really liked.

This picture was simply a quick shot into the tree above me. I like the shape of tree branches and leaves, the lines created against the sky. Turned into greyscale, the picture was too dark, and the texture of the bark was lost. I backlit it to the extreme, and it pushed the picture to this. A bit of contrast enhancement and playing with the histogram, and this is the result. It’s a rather edgy picture to me – not very serene – but there is something I also like about it, such as where the upper branch begins to get so bright it begins to disappear.

I cropped this picture a lot – it is evidenced by the size of the signature in the corner! Anyway, this crop is of some tiny cactus flowers on a lovely plant with pointy needles. I decided to emphasize the pointiness, both on the spikes, and more generally on the shadows. The back-and-forth movement of light and dark is the idea behind this picture, both soft and sharp.

I cropped this one to bring the focus onto the leaf itself. I pushed this, with contrast and edge sharpening. This is the underside of the leaf, which has a lot of linear texture. I also think this one has the potential to go further in subject matter – calla lily leaves are really lovely to look at through light because the veins in the leaf are so intricate.

Finally, there is this one. I played with it a bit, and finally cropped it and rotated it so that the main branch of the leaf became horizontal and rested in the lower third of the photo. Again, the contrast was pushed, and the final image cropped.

You can see all these photos on Flickr, in B&W and in color.

Altogether, the post-processing was quite a satisfying experience. I thought about my compositions, and saw things in the original photos I liked, did not like, and I learned more about framing an image as I cropped and turned. I may not get great photos out and about, but I do think I will be looking at the entire image more carefully before snapping a picture (unless I am crawling in the mud!).

Color

I love color. Lots of color. The fact is, it is extremely difficult for me to buy things that, to me, do not have color. That means beige, white, and black. A Japanese kimono full of vibrant colors is far more interesting than the serenity of monochrome; Hawaiian shirts hold endless attraction. Prints intrigue me far more than a brilliant, single color.

Because color is so attractive, the absence of color in a painting – such as in sumi-e – and in photography – become endlessly fascinating in the variations of black-grey-white. Color reduction, meaning decolorization, can be done in various photo editing software programs. This pushes the photograph to near monochrome, but with an essence of color. The same may be done in an ink painting. Both become intriguing as the color draws the eye, but because of the lack of color elsewhere, it also becomes a messenger, speaking to the viewer on a symbolic level. Or, it can simply become an attractive element essential to a composition.

In sumi-e, there is a challenge in gradation and contrast. This is managed by both how the brush is loaded as well as forethought and knowledge as to how dark something will dry – or, more challenging – how light. Understanding the paper being used, the qualities of the ink stick, the subtleties of the brush become an art in themselves, all of which lead to the success or failure of the final painting.

In photography I am finding much the same challenge. In playing with software, such as Corel Paintshop Photo Pro X3 and Photoscape, I can take a colored photograph and either decolor it, separate it into multiple pre-press layers, or simply change it to a grey-scale image. Red flowers which look awful in color can become quite fascinating when rendered into black and white.

Composition also plays into photography, as much as it does in painting. Because one is physically doing a painting, I think that the elements of composition have time to unfold, and the unconscious works toward the final result long before the concept is visible to the artist. It is a slower process altogether.

The very nature of photography lends itself – especially with digital – to taking picture after picture after picture. Only now am I considering more carefully my compositions. Knowing I can crop and edit in software, as well as the fact I don’t have to pay for printing, lets me shoot all over, all and everything. This lets me play. Play is creative, fun, and educational. Happenstance leads to analysis in looking at photographs, which leads to thought about all the elements which come together, as they do in painting, to create the final image: light, subject, color, direction, contrast. As a result, I am developing the skills which permit me to think ahead a bit; these are the same skills, conscious or not, which I apply to a painting.

I am finding that my preferences in photography echo those I have for paintings. Simplicity and contrast. Less is more. Whether or not I succeed is up for question.

Lost at Sea

Every now and then, something just grabs you. Two things did today.

Thanks to the info from Terry at http://www.sknitter.com – her link is on the right – I saw the newest Knitty edition. And on the cover is a gorgeous shawl, Shipwrecked.

The above click came just shortly after reading about a project that has been going on in England since 2007 – the digitizing of over 20,000 (you got it, 20,000!) photographs of expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctica from the 1840s to the 1920s. Not long ago I read the book, Endurance, which is about Shackelton’s wreck in the ice of Antarctica and how everyone returned alive after being stranded over a year. The current Time website has pictures of this project, as well a link to http://www.freezeframe.ac.uk/home/home, where pictures are posted.

There is something incredible about well-done black and white photos which has it all over most color photos. There is a sense of drama, as well as an ability to focus on the subject in the picture. No colors to distract, and so the eye finds shape, light, dark.

Such beauty!