You Can See a Lot...

just by looking.  

I have no idea what these pipes are for - they remind me of some sort of industrial menorah-like thing.  If there were twelve days to Hanukkah...  

They are a particularly ghastly yellow color, and the bricks are pretty sickly reddish hued, which is why black and white will never die.  

And here's my down and dirty black and white almost the zone system:

1.  Shoot 16 bit raw.

2.  Get as much tonal detail as possible in your editor of choice.

3.  Convert to B&W.

There are a whole bunch of ways to convert - I use NIK Silver FX, or a B$W adjustment layer.  I was surprised by the endless complexity some authors come up with to make a black and white image...

 

 

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...

The Better the Color, the Better the Black and White

Got to discussing with someone how I make black and white images in the digital age. What I do is this: get the fullest range of colors and color contrast possible, and then convert to black and white. As in the image to the left. Photography has always been in color - it's the materials that dictated the output.
A full range of tones, with details in the shadows and the highlights is the ideal. And since we have the advent of 16 bit color, we are dealing with a huge number of colors. ]
The Zone System made it possible, for the first time, to represent a contrast range that the naked eye could not see - if one squinted to make out the highlights, the shadows vanished, and vice versa.
Note: I am not referring to HDR which has it's place. Just not sure where...Given the movement of clouds, leaves, water and people HDR can be problematic. To squeeze the most out of any given fame is my goal.