Images and Notes » black and white

‘Fire’

James Howe — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 12:16:34 +0000

(Olympus E3, 50mm (2x crop factor), ISO 100, Exposure 1/4000 sec @ f/2.8)

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the cool things about the Gilmore Car Museum is their replica Shell gas station. They’ve done a nice job outfitting the building with vintage signage and contents (tools, oil cans, etc.) Just outside of the building is a rack of old tires. I liked the character of the old tires and tried to capture the feeling. I was using my Olympus E3 with the 50mm macro lens (equivalent to a 100mm full frame) which gave me a nice crisp shot of the tire. My only regret is that I should have closed the aperture down a bit more. I think part of the raised lettering is a bit out of focus and I think I would have preferred it to be as sharp as the cracks in the tire. Oh well, maybe next time.

The out of camera image is a bit flat so I tweaked the black settings and increased the clarity to increase the contrast and bring back the cracked character of the tire. I also felt that a square crop was more suited to the image than the 4/3 ratio of the original. A simple conversion to black and white using Silver Efex Pro 2 completed the processing.

Thoughts or comments? Leave them below!

Seeing by Touch

James Howe — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 12:32:07 +0000

(Nikon D700, 70-300mm at 170mm, ISO 250, Exposure 1/2000 sec @ f/5.6)

The annual Eyes on Design car show is part of a fund raiser for the Detroit Institute of Ophthalmology. The show isn’t quite as big as some of the larger Concours d’Elegance shows held around the nation, but it generally as a couple hundred cars of various vintages, with the focus on automobile design. The show is held at the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House in Grosse Point Shores, Michigan. The house is located next to Lake St. Clair and has wonderful grounds for a car exhibition.

Because of the connection with the DIO, one of the nice things they do is let individuals who have sight issues view and judge the cars by touch. It’s fascinating to watch the reactions to these people as they feel their way around an automobile, asking the owner for specific information such as what the color of the car is, for example. I thought this was really fascinating and I tried to capture some images of this process at work. I liked the image above the best because I think it demonstrates the light touch that is used to really ‘see’ by feeling.

Processing was fairly straight forward. I debated about color vs. black and white and went with black and white, although I think both images work. In the conversion, I tried to keep the glove brighter because I wanted to focus the eye on the action of the hand.

Love to hear your thoughts and comments.

Defiance

James Howe — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 13:05:56 +0000

(Nikon D700, 70-300mm at 122mm, ISO 200, Exposure 1/500 sec @ f/8.0)

On a recent Saturday I decided to take a short day trip into northern Ohio. I wanted to drive on some back roads to see if I could find anything interesting to shoot. For this trip I decided that my destination would be Defiance, Ohio. I thought Defiance looked interesting because it is located at the intersection of three rivers. I found a couple of interesting things to shoot on the way as well as a few interesting things in Defiance itself. One of those was this old railroad building. It was hard to tell if the building was still in use, but I liked its simple character.

For processing I just wanted to enhance the basic black and white of the building itself. There were some distracting elements around it so I used some vignetting to focus the image more on the building. The conversion and border were done using Silver Efex Pro2.

Feel free to leave comments, questions or critiques below. Thanks!

Rocketship

James Howe — Thu, 26 May 2011 12:02:21 +0000

(Nikon D700, 50mm, ISO 200, 5 exposures @ f/8)

On my way home from my visit to Fayette, Ohio (and Hal’s Garage) I headed up highway 109 towards Michigan. Just before I got to the Michigan border, I came across this grain elevator at a farm. What caught my eye was how rusty the thing was. Most of these things are really shiny aluminum, but not this one. The road didn’t have a really wide shoulder and there was a bit of a drop off to a ditch so I didn’t have a lot of room to pull over and get a good shot. I ended up pulling over and shooting this from my car window.

I shot five exposures, thinking that I might want to create an HDR, but after looking at the tonemapped image (seen below), I decided to see what it might look like in black and white. I didn’t really like the truck that was parked along the right side of the image, so I tried to find some way to minimize it. I’ve been attracted to the various ‘Antique Plate’ effects in Silver Efex Pro 2 and found that using a reverse vignette did a nice job of eliminating the truck and drawing more attention to the main subject. I played with the contrast and structure to get the level of detail that I wanted, and ended up with the image you see above.

Hal’s Garage

James Howe — Wed, 25 May 2011 12:38:08 +0000

(Nikon D700, 70-300mm at 125mm, ISO 200, Exposure 1/500 sec @f/8)

In my quest to find new material to shoot I took a short road trip into northern Ohio this weekend. I had seen a picture of this structure posted by one of my Flickr contacts and I thought it would be interesting to see it myself. I headed down to Toledo, Ohio, where I picked up US-20 heading west. Once I got out of the Toledo area, the road opened up to wide open farmland. I was hoping I might see an old barn or two, and I was really hoping I might find one with a painted “Mail Pouch” tobacco sign, but no such luck. I did see one barn which I’m pretty sure used to have a sign painted on one end, but it had been freshly painted over. Anyway, I pressed on until I reached Fayette, Ohio, a small town in western Ohio. There, on the eastern side of town, is “Hal’s Garage”. My understanding of this building is that it is just a private garage, not a working garage, but I still think it is pretty cool. I love the old signs and the way trunks of cars are used as awnings.

My thought for processing was always to create a black and white image, but conversion posed a couple of challenges. I wanted the yellow Shell sign to show up, but as I played with various sensitivities it tended to blend in with the wall color. It took a little tweaking to separate it from the background, but that caused the Speedway sign to be too dark. I solved this problem by making an initial black and white conversion with Silver Efex Pro 2 and then masking out the Speedway sign. I then used a simple Photoshop black and white layer to do the conversion on the Speedway sign. The one thing I wanted to keep was the rust spots and streaks and in order to do this I had to lighten the blue background a bit.

Got comments or questions? Feel free to leave them below.

Lamp

James Howe — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 17:55:26 +0000

(Olympus E-3, 14-54mm at 19mm (2x crop factor), ISO 400, exposure 1/160 sec @ f/4.0

For some reason I’ve had this image sitting in a blog posting which was never published. I must have started to create a posting and then got distracted. Anyway, I finally decided to go ahead and publish this shot. The image shows a lamp which was on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The lamp was part of an exhibit on design. I took this picture a couple of years ago so I don’t know if the exhibit is still there or if it was a temporary thing. The thing I liked about the lamp was the geometry. I liked the band of alternating black and white rings of the base and the interesting light shade. Of course, the coolest thing is the pattern it creates on the wall when the light is on.

When I took the shot there was no doubt that this would be a black & white image. The lamp itself was black and white and only appears yellow in the raw shot because of the lighting and my lack of white balance adjustment. Processing involved using a Black & White adjustment layer in Photoshop along with some curves adjustments. I finished it off by creating a film grain layer and doing a minor crop to make the base touch the bottom and sides of the image.

Comments and feedback welcome.

9542 – Take Two

James Howe — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 17:09:14 +0000

(Olympus E-500, 40-150mm at 150mm (2x crop factor), ISO 100, Exposure 1/750 sec @ f/8)

I was working through my Lightroom catalog this morning trying to find some shots that I had edited recently. I wanted to export them so I could print them. As I was working through the catalog, I came across an image of two trains that I had taken in the summer of 2007. I had produced a final image that I liked at the time, but when I saw it today I thought I might tweak it a little to come up with something different.

The original finished image (shown below) was the result of quite a bit of Photoshop work. I added some motion, cloned out some wires and produced a sepia toned image. I have a full description of all the processing that went in to that image on my Image Notebook blog. Anyway, the one thing which always sort of bothered me was the bland sky, it just seemed like something else was needed but I didn’t know what. Since I’ve been experimenting with textures of late, I decided to see what would happen if I added just a bit of texture.

To get to the modified image you see above, I first reworked the black and white conversion. In my original work, I had used the black and white adjustment layer to do the work, today I used Silver Efex Pro 2. As I always do when using Silver Efex Pro, I look through the presets to see if there is something that looks like it would be a good starting point. There were actually quite a few that I liked, but I decided on one of their Film Noir presets. I liked the way it darkened the image and gave it more of an industrial feeling. I added a bit of structure and removed the border that the preset uses and saved the change. On my top layer, I added a ‘Basalt’ texture which added a gray crackled texture. I like what it did with the sky, but I didn’t want it on the train itself so I masked it out. All of the other processing I had done with the original image I left alone.

Here is the way the image looked directly out of the camera.

There still isn’t a lot going on in the sky, but I think the addition of the texture added a bit more interest. I also think I prefer the darker, heavier look of this version. Like to know what you think.

Through the Windshield

James Howe — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 17:51:27 +0000

(Nikon D700, 70-300mm at 70mm, ISO 200, Exposure 1/60 sec @ f/8.0)

This image is not my usual style, I sort of took it on a whim. I had gone out to shoot some shots of the University of Michigan campus during a snowstorm and I had just parked my car and was getting my gear ready. I popped my lens on and decided to fire off a quick shot looking out the windshield of my car. Just a quick grab shot and that I wasn’t really expecting much from. A few weeks after I too this, I noticed it in my Lightroom catalog and I thought it looked sort of interesting. Given the somewhat abstract nature of the shot, I knew this had to be black and white. A simple conversion using Silver Efex Pro and a bit of sharpening and I ended up with my final image. Click the image to see it in lightbox mode. I think it looks better on a darker background.

Comments

Broken Fence

James Howe — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:12:14 +0000

(Nikon D700, 50mm, ISO 200, Exposure 1/160 sec @f/1.8)

I recently purchased a Nikon D700 camera to ultimately replace my Olympus E-3. I loved my E-3, but there were certain features that were lacking and Olympus seems more interested in developing their micro 4/3rds cameras than releasing newer pro level cameras so it seemed time to make a switch. I received the D700 yesterday and managed to find a little time to take a few shots with it. I still have a lot to learn about how I want to configure the camera and how to best make use of it, but I think I’ve got the basics.

This shot was taken in Bandemeer Park in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was late in the day with the sun about to set. I saw this fence post and decided it might make for a nice shot. The color of the post blended well with the background. In a few weeks the background will be green, but for now it is a nice winter brown. Overall I like the way the picture came out, although if I were doing it again I might go for slightly more DOF. I think I would like more of the post itself to be sharp, not just a portion of it. The image was converted to black & white using Adobe Lightroom and then I added a bit of local contrast using Topaz Adjust in Photoshop CS4.

Other thoughts? Please leave a comment!