Winter Light

I hate cold weather.  Never had the constitution for it.  But winter light is something else, it can almost make me forget how cold I am when I'm shooting.

Being able to get low light shots without intrusive noise is another reason I will never willingly use film again.  It was close to sunset when I made the image on the left.

I find I am doing more images as black and white, and getting better black and white than I did with black and white film.  When I thought about it for a while I realized that I all of the images I made started out as color, but were being captured (that word!) by black and white film.  To make really strong black and white images that way required some serious (to me) mental gymnastics.  Overexposing just so much through the right color filter, developing less than the manufacturers recommendations, printing through multiple filters on multi-contrast papers, split development, toning and dry down (when the paper dries the contrast range changed) factors all added up to hours of work, gallons of chemicals and a huge amount of water to wash the resulting prints.

I now work to get the best color image I can with the greatest separation of tones, and then convert to black and white and POW!  16 bit RAW, NIK filters, and/or the various free actions available here:http://atncentral.com/image_enhance.htm

Throw in and adjustment layer and double-pow. 

Check out the Caponigro adjustments...