day photography » One Fine Picture

Fun with Black and White

Jun 142011

Here’s a quick before and after that adds some punch in black and white. On one of my many Cleveland Zoo visits, I found this incredible talking bird. Well, the bird didn’t really talk but seemed to do everything else.

She carefully followed the stage handler, walking back and forth on a small wooden plank. At one point, she started to mimic or perhaps mock, depending on your point of view, the event by raising her foot every time the handler raised her hand.

Hello, right hand up, right foot up, wild applause and then a healthy dose of bird feed. You get the idea.

Before	After

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Later, in the lab, I messed around with the channel mixer and apply image to get this textured black and white.
The major change was adding the contrasty blue channel to the red and green ones. Usually, the blue channel is pretty noisy but since I shot this at ISO 100, that wasn’t a problem.You can do this by image/apply image/ and then select the blue channel with blending set to normal and opacity 60% or layer/new adjustment layer/channel mixer/ and decrease the red and green channels from 100% to 40% with increasing the blue to 60%. Either gets the same result. Afterwards, I used one more channel mixer adjustment and checked the monochrome box to get a black and white.

Some final burning and dodging took out the background and gave the bird a portrait look.

Now down to the lake for some cool water…

Time to cool off

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The Arcade Part #2

black and white, camera settings, day photography No Responses »

Apr 132011

We last left off at the Cleveland Arcade, the first indoor mall in the U.S. and a beautiful Victorian-era structure of two nine-story buildings, fused by a five-story iron and glass annex.

I thought it might be interesting to capture this historic architectural gem in black and white through the eyes of a shopper. My first obstacle was the windows. Windows are tough to shoot and prone to bright glare and countless reflections. I had to keep moving my tripod around to find a clean view. There were 40 other photographers at this field trip so that was a bit of a challenge. (You can see one at the end of the long walkway on the far right in Window #2)

Next up was fun and games with Photoshop. The good thing about digital is that it offers a much greater range of tone or transitions from black to white, than tradition film. The final print has a richness that film can’t rival.

The not so good part is that’s there’s no real science to this other than fiddling with the channel mixer and calculations until you stumble upon the right mix.

Here’s my attempts

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