Lets see your B & W's

[Frogg07 0]

A sepia tree

 

B&W creek last winter

 

 

Chris

[Graham 0]

[KVRNut 0]

The most beautiful picture I have ever seen. My son Connor, born Oct, 3 2007. I'm just a little bias!

 

Be biased Capt.! :thumbup: I know I sure would be!!

 

Congratulations to the both of you. :clapping:

 

Ernie

[Graham 0]

Congratulations Matt, What a priceless photo!!!

[Guest]

Super picture Matt.

 

 

 

Jim

[Steve P 0]

Graham that pic of the rose is so beautiful I can't even express it in words, your work is something to behold.

 

Capt. you have every reason to be bias and congrats on the new fishing buddy, but as a word of advise from someone who has been there... if you hunt wait until he can at the least walk until you buy him his first rifle. My wife nearly skinned me alive when I bought my first son a .22 cricket for his first Christmas (he was 10 months after all) aparently she didn't see the value of starting his collection early. Now as far as th shot gun for his fourth birthday her father had a hand in that (or atlest I have them both convinced he did) just be careful with those kinda things I'm learning that women don't think in just the same manner as we do.

 

Steve

 

 

[Hardyhead 0]

 

 

Great pictures folks.

 

Graham-

 

Your rose is a stunning subject, try bumping the contrast up a little bit. If you look at your original photo, you have no 'true' white, and 'true' black. Crank the contrast up using photoshop or Gimp, just a little bit at a time until you get a true black, and your whites will be whiter, and your gray will have more definition. Your subject, framing, and depth is fantastic, but when I shoot black and whites I always want a true black or a true white in a resulting picture. Some may call this cheating, but it's no different than what you would do underexposing or overexposing a print in the darkroom. Hope you don't mind my input.

 

Matt-

Great looking baby and a very pretty picture, keep posting B&Ws folks, I really enjoy them. I will try and get some of mine up, so many photos to process, but so much time needed at the vice :dunno:

[Graham 0]

Hi Steve P and Hardyhead, Thank you, I'm glad you like the photo, it's one of my wife's favorites. I tried adjusting the black and white points to show more contrast, but that seems to diminish the shadow detail. I think the problem is that there really isn't any true white in the original shot. This is the first photo that I tried to deliberately control the light for changing to black and white later in Photoshop. I used a silver reflector to kiss a touch of extra light onto the edges of the petals, without projecting the light too deep into the flower, which gave it a much cooler look when compared to using a gold reflector. I took quite a few shots of this rose and prefer the cooler look than the warmer tones. I walk out back almost every morning, looking for things to photograph, including the row of rose bushes, and this is the only bloom that has caught my eye so far as being interesting enough to set up a tripod and reflector stand. Here's the original color photo.

 

[Hardyhead 0]

Graham-

 

Very nice original as well, I like the tone of the color photo.

 

I converted this in Gimp, and bumped the contrast ever so lightly. Not sure if this is better or worse, but there was no adjustment to the brightness done here. The goal was to make the region in the upper right of the photo your true black. Either way, still a great macro shot, hard to get much better than what you produce.

 

 

[Graham 0]

Thank you Hardyhead!!! I think it does look better and the shadow detail is still there. I need to learn a lot more about B&W photography and digital processing because I love the B&W look. I can switch my camera into B&W mode but from what I've read online its best to shoot in color with digital and convert the image later? I'm wondering if this is true?

 

Graham

[Hardyhead 0]

 

Well I am glad you like it, always make me nervous when doctoring someone elses photos.

 

I have heard the same as you, shoot in color, then switch to grayscale in photoshop or other photo editing software. I am not sure why this is, but it may have something to do with the image capturing by the camera. It may not be able to effectively capture enough black or white in the spectrum you are looking at, and all photos may have that washed out look. By washed, I mean what happens when you look at a B&W and it is almost all grey. That is what you are trying to avoid. It's hard to do, and some photos simply will not look good in B&W.

 

I like your photo of the round ball thingies. The balls with the highlights and the shadows are a perfect example of a great contrasted shot. The texture shows up great too.

 

I have a few shots that took this weekend of some fog on the river while fishing. I will process them and see if they come out in B&W or not. Either way I will post the results.

[Hardyhead 0]

I shot these on Saturday morning on the Oconto River in Wisconsin. It rained on my for about 2 hours of my fishing time, and when the rain broke the heat rolled in, raising the temperature from about 60 degrees to about 85 degrees in about an hour. The resulting mist was nice, so I nabbed a few shots. I think I was about 15 minutes late, it seemed to have thinned substantially by the time I took the photos. The sky was overcast, one solid shade of grey, not a good day for B&W, but they came out ok. No filters, just straight on my fishing camera the D40X. Enjoy.

 

Ryan

 

 

[Graham 0]

Beautiful photos Hardyhead.

 

 

[Peterjay 0]

From what I've read, sophisticated editing programs like PS do a better job of greyscale conversion than any in-camera operation can do. I shoot probably 90% of the time in RAW mode and convert everything in Preview and/or PS, and I've been more than pleased with the results. Supposedly, using the RAW mode will expand the tonal range a bit, and nothing I've seen in my admittedly limited digital experience seems to contradict that.

 

On the subject of light, there are situations that just will not translate to good B&W (or color for that matter) images, regardless of what post-capture processing methods you use. Film or digital, it doesn't matter - flat light is still flat light, and overly contrasty situations will still be more than your equipment can handle. Learning to recognize good lighting is the single most important step anyone can take to improve their photography. It takes a lot of practice, but it's vital to anyone who wants to take their stuff to a higher level.

[Hardyhead 0]

 

Great shot of the blossoms Graham.

 

I did some reading on the shooting with your camera in B&W mode as opposed to shooting in color and converting to black and white. From what I can find, the reason you should shoot in color is because of the make up of the CCD itself. The camera's CCD is actually a matrix of millions of little squares which register different wavelengths of light. When you shoot in color, your CCDs squares pick up their corresponding wavelengths and you get a 'complete' image. If you shoot in B&W mode, your camera actually turns off a bunch of those CCDs, so you actually end up absorbing less information. The estimate I saw was for the Nikon D series 10 megapixel CCDS said that you could lose as much as 20% of your CCDs capacity when shooting in B&W mode as opposed to color.

 

Also of note, the book I was reading said to only shoot in RAW for black and white, since color filters tend to not work as well on digital cameras, you should shoot in RAW and filter the image in color using photoshop (or whatever you use) and then convert it to grayscale.

 

Just a few thoughts.