Extreme Macro Photography on a budget

So, you like the idea of doing macro photography, but you think you can’t afford it? Think again – with less than £1 worth of equipment, a little bit of sweat and tears (and blood, if you, like me, are a bit on the clumsy side), and you can build yourself a surprisingly good macro lens. Don’t believe me? Well, have a look at the article, and think again!

Of course, as I’m using a Pringles can to make this lens, you also have the opportunity to pause for a snack. Now that’s the type of DIY projects I like.

So you want to take pictures of things up close, do you? You have gone tired of all the regular ways of doing so? Ready for bellows and reversing rings, but can’t afford them? Have no fear, there is a far cheaper way to get a reasonably good result!

Also, Before we go any further… Need I say that you do all of this on your own risk? If you chop a finger off, ruin a lens or your camera body, it’s your own fault, and your own problem. Just be really careful, and you should be fine.

Cannibalising lens covers

This project takes base in cannibalising a few of the lens- and body covers that most of us have laying around. These are great, seeing as they are already created to connect to the camera – the easiest way to get the correct bayonet fittings to attach stuff to your camera body and lenses!

Obviously, the covers are solid, which is no good to us. So, in order to get them into an useful state, I attacked them with a Dremel tool.

Such a grind…

Carefully chopping the fronts out of a camera body cover and a lens cover takes quite a bit of time, not least because I wanted to do it as neatly as possible.

When you are done, remember to matte the cut by using emory paper (sanding paper): You want to make sure it doesn’t reflect light.

Pringles box to the rescue

What you make the actual distance tube out of is relatively unimportant, as long as it is completely light-proof. I decided to use a pringles tube because I have done projects in the past with them, so I knew that they were approximately the right size. It turned out, in fact, that it was exactly the right size. Nifty.

After removing the top and decantering all the lovely crisps into a bowl (nope, I’m not affiliated with Pringles. And the jury is still out if the crisps type have any impact on the photo quality of the end product), it was time to attack the bottom of the tube

Sparks! Oh, the pretty sparks!

Cutting out the bottom of the pringles can caused a lot of pretty sparks, so I couldn’t resist the temptation of taking a few shots.

Ladies: sorry about the unwashed hair, beard stubbles, messy room, and general colour mismatching of this photo. If this turns you on, marriage proposals go on an ePostcard to the address at the bottom of the article.

So… Why the lens cover?

There was no logistical reason for why I decided to cut holes in both the body and the lens cover, other than that I thought it might come in handy later. With the final design, it turned out to not be necessary. It did, however, come in quite handy: The lens cover cap works as a flare-reducing hood, and it helps protect the electrical contacts built into the lens. In addition, it makes it easier to grab on to the lens as it is stuck in the tube.

Chalk that one up to luck rather than than planning, but cut a hole in a lens cover as well, because it makes your life easier, and it reduces the chance of putting one of your lenses out of commission. I don’t know about you, but I prefer to keep my lenses in one piece. I’m not that rich: I’m writing an “on the cheap” guide.

Sticky situation

So, once the pringles tube had a big hole in the bottom, I set out to attaching the body cover and the Pringles tube.

Any strong glue should do. I suspect a hot-glue gun would probably be best, but I was out of glue sticks, so decided to use epoxy glue instead.

Anything to make the two pieces stick firmly to each other. If the glue you use sets translucent, you may want to take a black felt-tip pen and colour it dark, to prevent light leaks.

Firmly attached

After the epoxy glue had set, I had to try to see if it fitted on my Canon 20D.

Sure enough, it was a perfect fit.

Professionality aside, I gladly admit to doing a minor victory dance at this point.

A snug fit – banishing light
My idea was to use black felt to block out the light leaks from outside the lens.

The particular lens I decided to use for this project is the cheapest Canon standard lenses, namely the Canon 50mm f/1.8 MKII.

It is just the right size, and despite being cheap as chips, it has a couple of tricks up its sleeve – more about that in a minute. Ideally, using an older lens would be a better idea – especially if it has manual aperture controls.

By wrapping black fabric (in my case, a t-shirt I didn’t really like anymore) tightly around the lens, I managed to block out all superfluous light.

Textile Hack

I’ll gladly admit that getting it right took a couple of tries, but eventually I found exactly how much fabric was needed. To hold the bundle together, I decided to tape it all together.

After this, the lens fitted snugly in the Pringles container. Not only did it not fall out, it slides quite easily, so if you need to move it, you can just push or pull it to where you need it. Once you let go, it stays put. This is actually quite important, as it’s part of the focussing strategy: You don’t focus using focus rings, but by moving the lens closer or further away from whatever you are photographing.

Finally: Taking photos!

Right, everything has come together, and now it is time to do the fun stuff: Take pictures!

Modern HDR photography, a how-to or Saturday morning relaxation

Today’s digital cameras match or slightly exceed the performance of silver halide film. Computer graphics has achieved the goal of photorealism. Now the goal is to go beyond simply matching paper and silver halide – to create display technologies which can present any visual stimuli our eyes are capable of seeing.

One area of rapid development is in dynamic range. A new crop of technologies using High Dynamic Range imaging (HDR or HDRI) aim to extend the dynamic range of digital imaging technologies way beyond traditional media.

In this article, I’ll look at recent advances in the field of high dynamic range imaging. I will cover the basic concepts of dynamic range, and talk about new HDR technologies.

The Problem

Here’s the problem in a nutshell:

* Real-world scenes contain light ranges that exceed a 50,000:1 dynamic range.
* For over a thousand years, media has been limited to around a 300:1 dynamic range.
* So you have a mapping issue: how do you represent light values in a scene using a much more limited set of light values for a particular media?

Old Solutions

Master painters were very clever about mapping scene intensities to canvas. They used a large number of tricks


Dynamic Range in Photography

Photography involves a capture device (the camera), a storage medium (e.g. film), and a display or output device (e.g. paper).

The dynamic range of each stage (capture, storage and output) plays a crucial role in the quality of the results. In general, technologies with greater dynamic range produce more realistic results. But photography is a compound process, and the dynamic range of each stage must be considered. When the dynamic range of the source scene is too great for any one stage of the process, something must be sacrified: you must either give up detail in the shadows or the highlights. Photographers have to know and work withing the limitations of their camera, storage and output devices.


The Next Horizon: Digital HDR

Over the next decade, the imaging industry will inevitably transition to high dynamic range (HDR) imaging, creating devices that provide a latitude range far greater than traditional silver halide film. This change will affect all aspects of image making. Each of the systems in the image workflow will be modified, including capture, storage, editing and output.

Capture

Today’s cameras have ample resolution. So the next area of product differentiation for camera manufacturers will be the quality of the pixels, rather than the number of pixels. This shift is starting to happen already.

For example, Fuji’s SuperCCD S3 Pro camera has a chip with high and low sensitivity sensors per pixel location to increase dynamic range (the same trick as used in color film to achieve broader latitude).
Although the resulting chip has lower overall resolution, it captures greater dynamic range. This tradeoff of resolution for dynamic range is the beginning of an important trend.

A second alternative is to merge multiple images to increase dynamic range. Paul Debevec at SIGGRAPH 97 showed how to take multiple photographs at different exposures and merge them together to create a single high-dynamic range image. This technique is now incorporated in products such as Photogenics and Photoshop. For now, the technique works best if the camera is mounted on a tripod. But researchers have already built HDR image “stitchers” which merge multiple images and automatically account for camera motion between snaps.

For most consumers, “HDR” will simply mean that the camera records more details in shadows and in highlights. Just as RAW images extended the detail held in digital images, HDR will further increase the available tonal range.

Consumers will benefit from the true point-and-shoot ability that broader latitude offers, because HDR cameras will produce usable images from a much wider range of lighting situations.

Eventually point-and-shoot cameras will lose their built-in flash. Anyone who uses a camera with a cheap flash soon learns that the pictures generally look better if you turn the flash off. Sensors are becoming more sensitive, cameras are getting smaller, and light metering is getting smarter. Add three or four stops of dynamic range, and the flash becomes a creative ad-on rather than a requirement.

Professional photographers will also benefit from HDR. With HDR technologies, photographers can really push the creative envelope, exploring the extremes of high-key and low-key effects.

Professional cameras will offer a multitude of HDR image-taking modes. For example, they will automatically blend multiple images taken with different exposures, with and without flash, possibly using multiple light sources, to produce a single and extremely maliable master image.

Storage

All image file formats have range limitations. Formats such as JPEG and GIF provide eight bits per color channel (often referred to as 24 bit color). Using 8 bits, you can represent 256 different intensities per channel. Most 8 bit formats use a “perceptual” mapping, meaning that they use a gamma (exponential) curve rather than a linear map of intensities. See Human vision and tonal levels or the venerable Gamma FAQ for an explanation of this. While JPEG and GIF are great for moderate dynamic range images, banding becomes apparent if you edit the image extensively, and the formats cannot store high-dynamic-range scenes.

Newer formats including JPEG2000, RAW and PNG offer up to 16 bits per color channel, which is plenty for most purposes. However, there is no support for “underage” or “overage” – these image formats state that “0″ should be mapped to the darkest black of the display, and “65536″ (or the equivalent) should be mapped to the whitest white. If you want to represent images that contain brightnesses beyond what your monitor can currently display (e.g. as produced by HDRShop), you need to look elsewhere.

The most exciting HDR image format today is OpenEXR, developed by Industrial Light & Magic.

I say this partly because their documentation includes photos from Star Wars (see above). But it also supports both 16-bit and 32-bit float representations, lossy and lossless codecs, and has a great definition for underage and overage.

Other examples of High Dynamic Range formats include SGI’s TIFF LogLuv format, Floating Point TIFF format, Radiance’s RGBE format, and Portable Float Maps (PFMs).

HDR image formats are especially significant for archival and stock uses, since they store data with enough precision to record what we can see, rather than what our displays can show.

There are a range of proprietary formats that offer medium or high dynamic range. The various RAW formats support whatever dynamic range the underlying device associated with the RAW file uses. Personally, I am not a fan of RAW formats for long term image stoage, since they are too device and vendor specific. However, that’s a whole other debate.

I don’t yet know if OpenEXR will become a consumer standard, or if it will remain a file format used only by Hollywood. Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Canon and others will no doubt have a big hand in shaping that decision.

Editing

Of all imaging tasks, editing is the one that demands the highest dynamic range. Editing operations need high precision to avoid aliasing artifacts such as banding and jaggies.

Audio professionals know this. Editing tools like ProTools already use 48 bits per sample internally, even though the common CD output format only supports 16. Why should we image makers accept anything less?

Recently, Adobe announced supports for 32-bit-per-channel HDR images in Photoshop CS2, a great step forward.

Idruna Software is another company doing interesting HDR software. I played with their PhotogenicsHDR when it first came out, but I found it a little hard to use. Perhaps the newest PocketPC version is different…

Photoshop users are familiar with the issues of low dynamic range today. With 8 bit channels, if you brighten an image, information is lost irretrievably: darkening the image after brightening does not restore the original appearance. Instead, all of the highlights appear flat and washed out. To avoid this problem, you must work in a carefully planned workflow.

With a true HDR tool, if you brighten an image and then darken it, you should see something very close to the original image. True HDR editing tools will enable image workers to follow a much more flexible and simplified workflow, using fewer adjustment layers, with fewer aliasing artifacts. I expect HDR software will lead to increases in productivity and greater expressiveness.

It will take the imaging software industry some time to retool and retrain. There are plenty of unsolved issues.

With HDR, for example, you run into the issue of representing brightness values present in the image but beyond what your current monitor can show. Do you clamp to the monitor’s gamut, show zembra stripes, map the colors some other way?

Another issue is how to create graphical user interfaces for HDR editing. Many designers are familiar with the RGB 0-255 color values, and can type in RGB color numbers directly using this system. e.g. 128,128,128 is a mid gray. But what happens when intensities go from 0 to several million? Where is mid gray? And how do you represent that in a graphical interface? If the tonal range goes from 0 to something close to the brightness of the sun, where is “white” on that scale? Do you mean monitor white, paper white, 3200k white, 5600k white …?

A third unsolved issue is image size: If each channel of an image is 32 instead of 8 bits, the image becomes four times larger. Switching to HDR therefore makes a 100mb image take up 400mb. Not surprisingly, editing operations take about four times longer. Software will need to become smarter about scheduling work. Live Picture, an early image compositing tool, did a good job of this, but is no longer available. I expect to see a revival of these techniques as people grapple with 10GB images.
Tone Mapping

Most LCD/CRT displays (and of course printed paper) have low dynamic range.

So if you want to output an HDR image on paper or on a display, you must somehow convert the wide intensity range in the image to the lower range supported by the display. This process is called tone mapping.

One old tone-mapping method is the manual dodge-and-burn technique familiar to photographers – where you manually select different tonal ranges for different regions of the image, using a dodging or a burning tool. HDR software will of course support manual dodge and burn.

Another solution is to use an automated tone mapping filter to reduce the dynamic range of an HDR image. There are already several filters to choose from.

The left image above shows what you get if you display Paul Debevec’s HDR photo of Stanford Memorial Church using a very basic tone mapping technique (simply clamping to the nearest available color on the monitor). Some areas of the image are “blown out”, and the shadow areas are muddy and lack detail.

The right image show’s Fattal, Lischinkski, and Werman’s tone mapping algorithm, which uses a more sophisticated adaptive approach – you see more details in the shadows and the highlights (look at the stained glass windows), though the image also has a somewhat “flat” or “computerish” quality.

Tone mapping is a hot area of research in computer graphics. As with HDR file formats, there is currently no clear winner. Several techniques are listed in the resource section. I expect the major companies to each champion their own tone-mapping technologies in service bureaus and print finishing.
Output

Over the past decade, display companies have steadily improved the dynamic range of LCD and DLP displays. Today many digital displays have a 2000:1 dynamic range, unheard of ten years ago. This trend of increasing dynamic range will continue.

A few displays available today indicate where the market is going. The most astonishing is the BrightSide HDR display with a claimed contrast ratio of 60,000:1, good enough to reproduce the effect of a sunlit scene. They achieve this using high-power white LEDs.

The only bad thing about the BrightSide display is that once you look at it for a few minutes you just assume that this is how images are supposed to look – it is such a transparently great technology that until you see a normal image on a normal display you don’t really think of the HDR display as that exciting. The display is still in the very-expensive bracket, but this will change quickly.

Of course, HDR displays work best if you have lots of HDR images. I anticipate a huge market for stock HDR imagery. See the Flickr HDR group for starters.
Applications

Today, the main users of HDR imaging devices are specialized professionals working in the film, animation and VR industries. Some applications are listed below (see the Resources page for links).

Film – Tools such as HDRShop by Paul Debevec enable you to convert a series of photographs into a light probe – a special image that represents the lighting environment in a room. You can then use the light probe to light virtual objects, so that the virtual objects actually appear to be lit by the light from the room. This technique is especially useful for compositing computer graphic objects into images of real scenes. Hollywood films use light maps extensively to blend CGI into a scene.

Panoramas – Another use for HDR is in panoramic images. Panoramas often have a wide dynamic range, e.g. one part of the panorama may contain the sun, another part may be in deep shadow. Online web panoramas constructed from HDR images look much better than non-HDR equivalents.

Games – A third use for HDR is in computer games. Recent computer graphics cards support HDR texture maps. With HDR texture maps, you can render objects using light probes, in real time, yielding much more dynamic and interesting lighting effects. “High Dynamic Range Lighting Effects” are now all the range in high-end games.

As more consumer-oriented HDR products arrive, I believe the largest application of HDR will be in consumer photography, though the term HDR is unlikely to be seen – instead you will see branding terminology, e.g. companies will make up words like “DynaChrome”, “MaxBright”, “SuperColor” etc.
Do we really need HDR?

I recently read this comment from Sam Berry:

… the whole article has no mention of the fact that the reason most controlled lighting is almost always done to ratio of less than 8:1 even with neg film /modern digital capable of much more is because that’s what looks good. HDR technology now means you can reproduce your harsh midday sunlit scene perfectly, and it will look identically awful compared to the original.

The debate boils down to this: Does an image with a 300:1 dynamic range look good because it represents a physical sweetspot — something to do with our perceptual system that works well at that ratio? Or is it that all we’ve had access to for hundreds of years are reflective images with a roughly 300:1 dynamic range, so we are accustomed to that?

I had a similar question in my mind before seeing the BrightSide HDR display. Now, after looking at a HDR image on a 50,000:1 HDR display, I am no longer concerned about over-brightness, 50,000:1 is still way less than the brightness of looking directly at the sun. It wasn’t blinding. It isn’t a question of harsh. Images simply looks better when they look more real.

In the coming decade, HDR digital imaging technology will arrive, and change how we take, manipulate, store, use and display images forever.

Photography, the Golden Mean, and Geeky Coolness

The "rule of thirds" dictates the placement of the focus of your photograph. Why?

The rule should actually be called the "rule of the Golden Mean". Across cultures and history, designers such as artists and architects - and even composers and poets - have adopted the Golden Mean as a ratio that is pleasing to the human eye. Nobody is certain why, but a rectangle with sides in the ratio of 1:1.6180339887499... just seems to please the aesthetic sense of the human brain. Simply - it just looks good.

The ratio of height to width of the rule of thirds is 1:2/3 (or 2/3:1, depending on whether your photo is oriented down or across). This gives a ratio of 1.5. This ratio, however, is only an approximation of the Golden Mean, which is why the rule of thirds seems to work so well: it is building an approximation of the Golden Mean within the boundaries of your photo.

Almost mystically, the Golden Mean seems to be a naturally occurring number, like pi or e. The Fibonacci series of numbers starts with 0 and 1, then adds two numbers to produce the next in the series:

0
1
2
3
5
8
13
21
34
55
etc.

Now, if you take successive ratios of consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci series, you get ratios that more and more closely approach the Golden Mean as you use higher and higher pairs of numbers.

For this and other major number coolness, check out this Golden Mean Web site.

Photographer Article

Landscapes in Contention
By Katie Winchell
Newport Beach/Costa Mesa Daily Pilot


As a rule, artists are passionate about their work. Acclaimed photographer Robert Ketchum goes a step further: He's just as ardent about the mission behind his messages as the images themselves.

For 25 years, Ketchum has produced photographs that fulfill two functions: artistic interpretation of the natural world and studied documentation of conflicting ideas on wildland use. A selection of his images are currently on display at the Newport Beach Central Library through May 31.

The exhibit draws the viewer in. The large Cibachrome prints, taken with a Pentax 6-by-7 medium-format camera, show Ketchum's mastery of composition and use of vibrant color.

"This show has had more attention and success than any other show at the library," said Newport Beach Arts Commissioner William Valentine. "We're really lucky to get him down here."

Two of the photographs are of Rancho San Carlos, one of the largest land grant ranches left in California. The 20,000-acre property is the site of a bitter contention between the land's owners who want to develop it in a manner that preserves much of the beauty, and local residents who oppose the development.

One of Ketchum's images is a broad landscape of rolling oak woodland, the other a study of an ancient moss-covered oak tree.

"This is an encapsulation of a lot of the things going on right now," said Ketchum. "I've chosen to document this project for a decade because it's a good example of what's happening with real estate and development here at the end of the 20th century."

Another breathtaking image is of a marsh and tree area in the Tongass National Forest, taken from Ketchum's book "The Tongass: Alaska's Vanishing Rain Forest."

Ketchum explained how the book, given to every member of Congress, helped sway opinions in the Capitol, resulting in George Bush signing the historic Tongass Timber Reform bill into law, protecting a million acres of old growth trees and creating five new wildernesses.

When Ketchum describes the stories behind his images, he combines the knowledge base of an environmental professor with the passion of an artist dedicated to his vision. It's easy to see why he is in such high demand by environmental groups and art collectors alike.

Ketchum's photographs are in most of the major collections in the United States. His work has been featured in more than 400 shows at institutions ranging from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the White House and Brazil's National Museum of Fine Arts.

His photographs have been published in magazines such as Life, Sports Afield and Audubon. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Sundance Institute and he has authored and photographed numerous books. He was presented the United Nations Outstanding Environmental Achievement Award by King Gustav of Sweden in 1991.

"We so often interject ourselves into nature [through development] carelessly, without thought," Ketchum noted.

"When I'm outside, I feel nature's vibrancy. I think that if we shed a little bit of our urban-ness and we spend a little more time in wild-ness, we become more careful with wilderness, so we don't wipe it out. We're in a race with time."

Warning: These 9 Photoshop Techniques May Result In Great Photos

Post-Processing (or photo editing) is what makes a good photo great. Cameras produce a good starting point, but post-processing is where the magic happens. If you’re feeling a little bored with your current arsenal of Photoshop techniques, try out some of these creative post-processing tricks to boost your artistic style.

High Contrast Color

Boosting the contrast in a color photo can produce some stunning results. Bump up the contrast, play with the colors, and add that sort of “grunge” mood to your photo.

High Contrast B&W

I love black & white photos, but I really love a good high-contrast black & white. This method creates a focus on the shapes, lines, and patterns rather than the tones. Also be sure to read my other black and white photography tips.

#
High Color Saturation

One way to make your photo “pop” is to really push up the color saturation. Just be mindful of color clipping and banding if you push it too far.

Vintage Look

Making a photo look older than it really is gives it a lot of character and mood. To get this look, you can toy with color saturation, color tinting, and adding imperfections.

Lomo Look

The real lomo photos have a very distinct look to them, but it’s a look that can be replicated through post-processing. They tend to be saturated in a very interesting way.

Oversharpen

Most photos need to be sharpened anyways, but some photos can actually benefit from oversharpening. This method gives the image a “harder” look and feel.

Texturize

Overlay texture to bring in subtle elements to your image. It’s a great way to deal with flat and bland portions of the photo by introducing detail and complexity into i

Add Vignette

Some images really stand out with some applied vignette. It helps create a natural frame around the image and it draws the eye toward the center of the photo.

Add Noise & Grain

This is another way to spice up the bland parts of your image. Adding noise or simulated grain adds texture and feeling to a photo, and can sometimes produce very “gritty” results.

As you can see, many of these photos apply multiple Photoshop techniques in addition to other techniques not listed here. So if you see a photo that intrigues you, ask yourself why. If you like it partly due to the post-processing, try to imitate the technique on your own photos.

And as for how to do some of these things… maybe we’ll save that for another day.

The Top 5 Black & White Photography Tips

Black & white photography, for me, is one of the most interesting and inspiring aspects of this art form we call our hobby and passion. It’s raw & refined, natural & unusual, bold & subtle, mysterious & open, emotional & impassive, simple & complex, black & white & everything in between. The monochromatic image has been with photography since the beginning, but what began as the only way to capture images has turned into something much deeper.


Interested in stepping-up your black & white game? Here are five tips to get you going in the right direction. If you want to learn more about the actual black & white conversion process in Photoshop, see my past entry that lays out 12 Ways to Make a Black & White Photo.

PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE

An experienced black & white photographer can see the world without color. They’ve trained their mind to pick up contrast and tone while blocking the distraction of colors. This isn’t a skill that you can pick up in a short amount of time; it’s something that comes naturally in time. I can’t say that I’m gifted enough to have monochrome vision, but I have been able to notice certain scenes and subjects that would lend themselves to black & white.

One way to help train your brain is to make a conscious effort — in other words, practice. Trevor carpenter gave us the perfect example when he started his October Challenge. Basically, he decided to limit his photography to black & white for an entire month. This gave him a chance to experiment with the medium and learn from his own work, and in his project recap he states “I have found, especially in recent days, that as I’m shooting and conceiving a shot, I see the potential impact of the composition in black & white.”


FOCUS ON CONTRAST

Black & white photography is about the black, the white, and all the tones in between. The human eye is built to pick up two things: light intensity and color. When you remove the color, your eyes become more sensitive to the light intensity. We naturally pick out areas of contrast — it’s how we distinguish one thing from another. As a black & white photographer, your main objective is to make your point with shades of gray. Use contrast to show your onlookers what’s important and what’s not. Seek out scenes that naturally show signs of high contrast, and your black & white photos will be more compelling right from the start.

When post-processing a black & white image, the use of Photoshop techniques like levels, curves, and layer blends give you a wide variety of output options. In addition to these things, burning and dodging are highly effective methods of improving contrast. They work so well because they allow you to focus the edit on a localized portion of the image without affecting the surrounding areas.


FOCUS ON TEXTURE

Texture is really just a form of contrast, but it is perceived quite differently. If you think about it, texture is the regular or irregular pattern of shadows and highlights at various intensities. Black & white photos really lend themselves to texture because color generally add another layer of complexity, thus masking most subtle textures. Look for areas of interesting texture that can be photographed by zeroing in on specific surfaces and examining them for signs of patterned contrast.

The choices you make in post-processing can really make a difference in the texture too. During the black & white conversion, you can usually pull texture out of otherwise smooth surfaces based on your choice of conversion methods. In digital photos, blues and reds generally contain more noise than greens, so tools like the channel mixer and the black & white adjustment layer in Photoshop can really accentuate those embedded textures.

CAPTURE IN COLOR

This is mainly aimed at digital photographers… If your camera gives you the option of shooting in color or black & white, NEVER shoot in black & white. The camera is really capturing color, then converting to black & white. Photo editing software can do a much better job at the conversion, and you’ll have more flexibility on the output of the final image. It’s really amazing how different a photo can look solely based on the post-processing, so it’s best not to limit yourself before the photo even makes it out of the camera.

The one exception to this rule is if you wanted to use the black & white capture to give you a preview of what the scene might look like as a monochrome image. It may help you identify good black & white scenes more immediately, but once you find your shot switch back over to color capture and shoot it again.


USE COLOR FILTERS

Black & white film photographers make use of color filters to change the captured tones in their photographs. Ever see those monochrome images with dark skies and puffy white clouds? That’s not natural; it requires the use of color filtering to produce the desired effect.

Using an actual color filter with a digital camera is perfectly acceptable and it has its merits, but it’s not completely necessary. Software like Photoshop has the ability to apply non-destructive color filters. It also has the ability to produce the same results as a color filter during the black & white conversion. For those of you using Photoshop CS3, you’ll see that the black & white adjustment dialog has several preset filters that can be applied and modified to suit the photo.

So if you’re interested in pursuing a little black & white photography, really think about these things — before, during, and after you shoot. Anybody can produce black & white photos, but it takes a little more thought and skill to produce good black & whites.

Why black and white?

Why not? It is crisp and clean with its patterns, shapes and lines to intrique our minds. Black and white photography is honest. No flashy punched up colors to get in the way. It's art, plain and simple. From the deep dark richest blacks to the crisp clean clear whites, it tells a story. With its gentle gradations of gray, it holds our attention and makes us want to see beyond the surface.

This is the way photography was meant to be before color took over and clouded our vision of what a great print should look like. Now we often look at a photo as an exact rendition of a scene and that is all. "Oh look, my couch is green, what a lovely shade of green." Black and white photography is different. It is about textures and emotions, light and the absence of light.

Lately there has been a resurrgence of interest in black and white photography. So much so that the major film manufactuers are now marketing newer black and white films designed for the consumer market. The new chromogenic films or C41 films can be developed by minilabs in the regular color processing. This allows consumers who do not have their own labs to shoot black and white film and have it developed at the local one-hour photo store.

It's been said that there is something sexy about black and white photography that you just can't get from color. I think it's true. Once you remove the color, it is like stripping a scene down to the bare bones removing the layers and leaving the form. You do not have to be an expert photographer to try black and white photography, after all, it was black and white film that not so many years ago captured the memories of many generations.

Why not give it a try. Research some of the different types of black and white film on the market today. One of my favorites is Kodak's Technical Pan film. It is very contrasty, but it makes fabulous enlargements and if developed in C41 developer(yes that is a color developer) it turns out gorgeous. Experiment with it. Black and white films are exciting because you can literally process your own film in a bathroom sink.

For those who like to drop off their film at the local one-hour photo place, try the new chromogenic films that can be processed in C41 along with the color negative films.

Get back to basics and try the classic look of black and white photography. To learn more about the different film types, click on the links below to read the datasheets in .pdf format.

Read more at Suite101: Why black and white? http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/photography/79428/2#ixzz0dQjnYiQ1