A little bit of black and white
- This topic has 13 replies, 10 voices, and was last updated Oct 9, 2009 at 9:17 am by
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I have had some shots in my head for some years now, but I just never saw the right combinations of light, location and fishing conditions to nail them. Until Mongolia the other day. I was really pleased with how the colour ones turned out, once I had registered that everything had very suddenly come together, plus the fisherman was naturally in the right place and hooking a few lenok.
But I kind of shot them with black and white in mind – I come from a colour background and I am totally self-taught. I have no history of knowing anything at all about shooting black and white, so while I am really pleased with the shots, I am perfectly open to the fact that nobody else might think that they are half as cool as me !!! Perhaps I have simply disappeared up my *&&££$$ in a haze of artiness……..
If I manage to upload these correctly to here, there should be a colour one first to show how I shot them in the first place (no digital trickery involved, just dialling back hard on the exposure compensation button) – followed by some black and white conversions. They lose a bit of impact being small photos, but I have printed a couple of A4 size this end and they start to come across as I intended.
take this for what it is worth because I know nothing about cameras!
I think they are cool shots, but I would like to see a little more of the background.Keith – thanks for your comments, taken on board. The colour shot is the one that is meant to have just a little bit of colour in the background, while the fisherman remains gently lit by the sun – I was aiming for a black and white conversion of the same shot that would in fact take any hint of texture out of the background, in order to leave the angler gently side-lit, and the whole emphasis of the photo becomes him, plus a few rocks, part of the rod and line etc.
But I see what you are getting at. Photography is so cool because we all see shots very differently, and what floats the boat of one person can leave the next perplexed.
I dig them … I like how much the fly line pops and how stark the contrast is, they could be woodcuts.
My thanks. Not the kind of shot it is possible to get very often, hence they are meant to be a little different.
Anybody got any experience with having their photos printed on metal ? I hear more and more about, just wondered if it is worth looking into.
Like these guys do it I imagine ?
Bob – bearing in mind that I don’t really have much of a clue about traditional black and white practises, I use the awesome NIK Software Silver Efex Pro……….it works as a Photoshop or Lightroom plug-in.
Check here, you can download a 15 day trial of it :
http://www.niksoftware.com/silverefexpro/en/entry.php
I just mess around with black and white for a bit of fun really, done purely to my personal taste. As you can see from the first (colour) shot in the sequence above, they were shot as very deliberately toned down photos. Black and white was what I had in my head from the off. They simply did not work when you allowed the camera’s meter to say “this is the reading”, the mix of bright sun, dark, shaded background and side-lit angler was essentially frying the meter’s brain – SLRs are incredibly accurate a lot of the time, but as I am sure most guys who work around fishing know full well, the trick is knowing when to take full control.
That is pretty cool Henry! Have you given a thought to reversing the colour’s; black to white? I think that would look awesome, with the reversed B&W colours and then extract the white, printed on velvet fine art paper. Kind of like pastel monotypes
I have seen some of the metal backed prints, they are nice but I think that they are a bit over rated. What I mean by this is, the fact that they have base layers so the metal, itself, is rather mute with its reflective properties. I think that the same quality can be achieved with high end museum quality paper and high grade inks. I saw a lot o prints glued to metal sheets, in the Baltic, and it was rather interesting as well as classy.
One thing that I love to do with dark prominent B&W prints is, print them on matt paper but set the printer to lay the ink down heavy with preset drying times between each pass. Gives the blacks a brushed silk kind of look.
Ben – never thought of swapping around the blacks and the whites, that sounds really interesting. Thanks for the heads up on the metal printing – to be honest, if I print this end it’s only ever on a fairly good A4 printer to put up in my office, the bulk of my photos go off to magazines etc., and I have a huge amount to learn about printing, displaying etc.
Plenty for the future.
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