We're Back

After abandoning this blog some 4 or 5 years ago, I have decided to resurrect it, as a place to learn about digital black and white photography.  I shoot mostly nature, so expect to see a lot of plant and animal life here.

I expect to post at least one photograph from my collection, each week, these will be set to publish at 3am on Sunday mornings, which lets me write it on Monday and then play with it during the week, before it automatically posts on Sunday morning.

Expect that posts will be partly commentary, and partly a teaching experience, and that there will be something of each.  Although I expect a photograph to be posted, some posts will be about an unrelated aspect of photography and digital imaging.  If your looking for use of certain tools, there are probably 65,536 different other sites that deal with that very issue.

One note, the caption on Photographs will be the catalogue number of the image, if you find an image you are interested in, then let me know, and I will inform you of prices.

This week we tackle the question, why do I prefer to work in Black and White.   I have been shooting black and white, since the late 1970's....

E4700302

Take a look at this image, it's of a flower; Specifically a Hibiscus flower, these are tropical flowers that are not native to my area, I did take it in my garden though, so it's not a photo I had to travel a vast distance to obtain.  While many people look at such flowers with the idea of them being colourful, that is often all we see.  A splash of colour against a green background. We usually don't get to see the textures, and the play of light from the delicate petals of the flower.

When we look at such an image stripped of colour, we do see these things.  So how is this done?


In the old days we chose a film like Plus-X or FP4, for a reasonable film speed, and low grain, took our pictures and then processed our film in a fine grain developer.   Then we got out the enlarger, and produced a print, and you would sometimes need to do a fair amount, to get a print that you liked, getting the exposure right and the tone the way you wanted it.  Sometimes you would use different paper some papers are colder, some are warmer.  You then might tone a print to get what you wanted.

Then I moved to a hybrid process, making a colour negative, and scanning that into the computer, and then doing some processing, to get a good colour digital image.  You would save this image, and continue working on it, to get a good black and white image, using computer software.

The next move was to a digital camera, it eliminates the film processing and scanning, and you're starting with a good digital image,  I shoot in raw mode, then automatically convert to a PNG file.   I have automated a lot of the process in my case, and can get a pretty good image, as the above one attests.  I can sometimes shoot over 150 images of different things, in a single day, so I want to be able to process the majority of those quickly, or at least without needing to sit and watch the process.

Until next week

W.