Black and white detail
- This topic has 25 replies, 14 voices, and was last updated Mar 12, 2010 at 9:31 pm by
.
-
Posts
-
I was out yesterday shooting some more UK winter fly fishing – nailed the job, plenty of fish, light up and down but the location worked out well. Not a dramatic place, but a good place for a magazine feature if that makes sense……easy to “control” the shoot and get the material we needed.
Aside from shooting stuff for the feature, I played around a bit with some detail shots that I then converted to black and white. Not the kind of thing the client is going to publish, but I just like doing it.
Would welcome any comments, I have no history of black and white work at all and I am learning as I go along.
Henry,
Love the shots. Can you possibly give details about the equipment used for these shots, specifically the lens? Love the look. I really like the focus in the first shot and the net in the second (if that makes sense). Great stuff!
Tim
Hey Henry –
Those are great shots; very commercial.
I’m sure you know this but it’s worth thinking over again.
Hi Henry,
I like the shots, but find them a bit crunchy in the contrast.
Zach,
The cat shot is excellent, but the dog looks like he could use a Prozac ? 😉
FWIW, I’ve shot a lot of B&W for work and it was fairly straight forward, but I still think digital, if well converted, will make better B&W prints than film did.
An exception might be a film like Polaroid 665 that has it’s own very unique look, but when you shot it, you were stuck with that look.
With digital, taking the shot is just the start.Here’s an old one shot on film, and then printed at home where I experimented with mixtures of blue tone and sepia.
(I think that’s what made me bald. ;D)
www.dsaphoto.com
A picture is thousand words that takes less than a second while a thousand words is a picture that takes a month.
Nice shots Henry .. I dig them. I noticed you added some grain, which helps the feel IMO. I think much of the feel of a b/w shot comes from the grain, in addition to the tones. Good stuff!
Really interesting to read all this – I hear what you say Zach……..I have a lot to learn about black and white, but I have not owned a film body for a long time now !! It’s a digital darkroom all the way for me.
Gear – Nikon D3, Nikon 100mm f.28VR macro lens (awesome bit of kit), natural light – deliberate shallow depth of field, around f4 I think.
Point taken on contrast, but I deliberately processed them this way – plus I underexposed slightly when shooting to retain the contrast and “mood”. I get the feeling that black and white is a hugely personal thing.
As I said, I have no history with black and white at all – it was always 35mm colour trannies before digital for me. I use the NIK Software Silver Efex Photoshop plug-in for black and white conversions. Again, so much to learn about it, but it seems to be an incredible programme that gives somebody like me a kid of virtual darkroom on my computers. If any of you want to mess around with it, go to the NIK software site and download a trial of it.
Very cool looking dog Zach – when I get back home I will dig out a photo of my sheepdog.
Poor Mae. She’s always looked like she’s strung out. Her eyelids droop. Great dog though.
Pretty dog regardless of her habit. Heroin chic. ;D
Matt – very cool blog, good luck after the redfish, a species I so want to see one day. I have put a link to you blog on my site – hope that’s ok.
Very timely topic as I work my way through a couple of hundred B&W conversions…….. Will download the Nik software and play with that.
Morsie
Great photos Henry, I really love high contrast black and white photos. You did a great job on the toning as well.
http://society6.com/grainfarmer Fly Fishing and Landscape open edition Photography prints.
http://grainfarmer.vsco.co/ iPhone photos
http://instagram.com/chad_simcox InstagramChad – thanks so much for that.
Morsie – when you find various b&W looks that you like, you can create Photoshop Actions that involve the pre-sets you can save in the NIK programme.
Great shots everyone. Hey Henry, the Nik SEP software is a secret weapon piece of software for sure. I had the opportunity to work with a real master of the program and you wouldn’t believe what the software is capable of doing in the hands of a pro . . . a few secrets include the use of “film types” in multiple renders with a subsequent blend; selective color-to-b&w masking; tonal range improvement using the details slider; and the biggest tool is understanding how the software separates photographic zones 1-9 for selective processing (think HDR for b&w). You can’t make an action of the program in PS but you can save a SEP preset in custom settings – I have a ton of these over time.
Here are a few examples of the above SEP tricks applied to some personal/fun photographs I took this weekend while on business. Notice also the carriage buggy shot and how the image blends the b&w and color layers using selective blend modes in PS, I am really loving this effect personally.
Is that Silver effects Neal? I use both Colour fx and Viveza depending on what Im trying to acheive sometimes both. Both of which enable you to convert to BW and get different looks.
This is one that I converted to BW using colour fx, then applied a film filter and finally some tonal/contrast.
original pretty much right out of the box (shot with 8 stop ND, a 2 stop soft edge and the B/G CP)
to this
Henry, sorry if this hijacks the goal of your original post – I love your images. Here a few more things to think about with B&W processing on the digital side. Also, great B&W conversion John! On the above post, SEP = Silver Efex Pro by Nik. I too use Viveza (the new Version 2 is incredible) and Color Efex Pro but for different purposes – honestly they are both used often in combination with Define 2.0 for general tonal/color correction early in the editing process. However, for B&W I generally go with Define 2.0 for noise reduction and then move strait to SEP for the B&W conversion because it is sooo good at what it does.
Here is a great trick for editing low light color images using B&W filters. It’s a bit of a stretch but it works! The technique involves blending 3 sets of background copies, each with a B&W layer on a mask which serves to desaturate and correct the exposure corrections. It’s a leap of faith for sure but the final product allows you bring out the underexposed regions without using HDR fancy trickery. It’s amazing what can be done with modern digital B&W processing.
Original RAW image – 50mm, f1.6, 1/60, 1/3EV, ISO 1600 (exposed for the window highlights)
Processed with merged color-and-B&W layered blending
For a lark you can then do a fresh B&W conversion on the edited tonal-corrected image.
p.s. – this is the trick I use to get good B&W fishing lodge shots at night.
As I said, I have a lot to learn about black and white – and also the power of a programme like SEP – thanks guys, some very cool stuff there, and also serious food for thought…….
Anyway, it’s not black and white, but I think I said earlier that I would dig out a photo of my sheepdog and post it up here.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.