Images and Notes » black and white

Chrysler Building – New York City

James Howe — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 22:09:19 +0000

(Nikon D800, 28-300mm at 250mm, Exposure 1/1000 sec @ f/8.0, ISO 320)

One of the joys of visiting New York City is the wonderful architecture of its buildings, both old and new. One of my favorite buildings in New York is the Chrysler Building, and one of the main reasons I like it so much is all the wonderful Art Deco details used in its design. Nothing is more iconic that the metal top which adorns this building. I took this shot on the last day of a recent trip to New York. I wasn’t able to get a nice night shot, so I worked with what was available. I was using my 28-300 lens on a rented D800 and I took numerous shots of the building from various angles. What I really wanted was an extreme close-up, but by the time you get far enough away from the building to have a nice angle on the top, even 300mm doesn’t get you very close. What I ended up doing for this shot was to crop a section out of larger image to get the detail that I wanted. Fortunately I was shooting with a rented D800 which has 36 megapixels to work with. Even after a very tight crop the image is still quite large and detailed.

I tried a couple of different ideas for processing. My initial thought was to try and get a nice clean black and white but I just couldn’t come up with something I liked. As I usually do, I looked through some of the presets in Silver Efex Pro2 to see if I could find a base look that I liked. Turns out it was the last preset, the ‘Pinhole’, which I liked the best. It created a nice strong vignette which drew my eye to the triangular windows, and it created an almost smoky look to the sky. I played with the default preset settings to improve the image, the default was too bright in the center and washed out some of the detail. What I find humorous is the fact that I used a $3000 digital SLR with medium format resolution to create a final image that looks like it was taken with nothing more than a pinhole camera. Of course, a pinhole camera would never have been able to get this shot.

Love to hear your thoughts on this one.

Atlas and St. Patrick’s Cathedral – NYC

James Howe — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 18:31:01 +0000

(Olympus E-3, 14-54mm at 14mm (2x crop factor), ISO 200, 1/2 sec @ f/3.2)

I have a trip to New York City coming up soon and I’ve been going through some past images that I’ve taken in New York to get some ideas about what I might want to shoot on this trip. I came across this shot that I took of the Atlas statue located in Rockefeller Center, just across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I’ve worked on this image before but never really came up with something I really liked. I’ve tried various things to remove the extra buildings since I wanted the focus to be on Atlas and the cathedral across the street. I tried something new this morning. I used a couple filter in Color Efex Pro4 to bring out some detail in the shot and increase color saturation, and then I used a Film Noir preset in Silver Efex Pro 2 to convert the image to black and white. I made some additional adjustments and came up with the final image. I think it has a nice almost hand-drawn character to it. It’s not perfect, but I think it came out all right.

Always interested in hearing your thoughts. Please leave them below.

Michigan Central Station – Carriage Entrance Side

James Howe — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 12:51:47 +0000

(Nikon D700, 28-300mm at 28mm, ISO 200, Exposure 1/2000th @ f/3.5)

This image shows the Michigan Central Station in Detroit from the carriage entrance side. The shot was taken from the back side of the building, close to where the tracks came in to the building. Carriages used to drop off or pick up passengers from under the metal structure.

Processing of the image involved a bit of perspective correction, I wanted a little less lean to the building. I also adjusted the crop a bit since it seemed to me that there was too much dead space along the left side. I experimented with different black and white conversions. I had a high key one that I liked, as well as a darker sepia, but in the end I went with a relatively contrasty plain black and white. I also used Topaz Detail to bring out some of the subtle color variation in the stonework.

Thanks for looking in and please feel free to leave comments and feedback below.

Gears

James Howe — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:04:56 +0000

(Nikon D700, 70-300mm at 145mm, ISO 800, 7 exposures @ f/5.6)

When the weather starts to get worse, I like to take the time to visit the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The museum houses a great collection of ‘industrial’ artifacts and they are quite reasonable about photography. One of the areas that I like to visit is the section on power generation. The museum has a great collection of generators from very old to more modern. I’m just attracted to the large scale and interesting mechanical details of these machines.

The shot above is was created from a 7 exposure HDR originally processed using Photomatix. Normally I like what the tonemapping process does to metal, but for this image it just didn’t work. After sitting on the image for several months, I took another look at it and decided to see what it would look like in black and white. I used Silver Efex Pro 2 to do the conversion and after flipping through some of the presets, I selected one of the ‘noir’ settings and then made further adjustments. I played with the contrast and grain to create a nice gritty image which I thought suited the subject. (The image below shows the normally exposed shot, not the tonemapped HDR.)

Always happy to hear your feedback.

Port Oneida Farmstead

James Howe — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 12:20:46 +0000

(Nikon D700, 28-300mm at 100mm, ISO 200, Exposure 1/125 @ f/16)

Port Oneida is an historic farming area in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. The area has an interesting collection of old farmhouses and out buildings. My wife and I were driving through the area on a less beaten path when we came across this farmstead. There was a farmhouse off to the right which was interesting, but I thought these two buildings had more character.

I had a couple of goals when processing this image. First, I wanted to tone down the patch of blue sky in the upper left corner of the image. Converting to black and white helped, as did adding a vignetted. However it still left a big bright spot in the upper corner so I used a technique that I had learned from watching some videos at The Mindful Eye, a web site run by Craig Tanner. Craig will oftentimes use selective scaling to make minor alterations to his landscape shots. I selected an area of the trees in the left corner and scaled them up a bit. I touched things up with a bit of cloning and did a minor crop of the image and the end result is that I was able to get rid of most of the sky. I also used some curves layers to selectively brighten and darken elements in the image. In the initial black and white conversion the building sort of blended in with the trees, so I used curves to brighten the building a bit. I also brightened some elements of the trees as well since they also were a bit flat from the conversion.

UMMA – Gallery – Old Wing (take 2)

James Howe — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 13:58:33 +0000

(Olympus E3, 7-14mm at 7mm (2x crop factor), ISO 100, 1/4 sec @ f/7.1)

This shot was taken in the old wing of the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA). I’ve always liked this gallery and I’ve been here a few times to take pictures of it. Each time is a little different, different people, different light, etc. I had a blog post back in 2010 with an image similar to the one you see here, but with a completely different method and style of processing. For that image I went with a grittier, almost HDR look. I liked the way the processing brought out the detail in the floor, but I’ve always felt that this shot was meant for black & white. I also wasn’t too thrilled with the number of people in the shot, so I went back at a later date and took the shot you see above. In this shot, there is only the one woman on the bench, which I like better. I also chose to convert the image to black & white. Initially I created an image to which I added a bit of film grain, however I ultimately decided that I wanted a smoother look. I edited the shot to hide the grain layer and used Lightroom noise reduction to help smooth the shot out even more.

I would love to hear your feedback.

Morning at the Harbor

James Howe — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 11:44:32 +0000

(Nikon D700, 70-300mm at 145mm, ISO 200, 1/30 sec @ f/16)

On a recent trip to Marquette, Michigan I had an opportunity to walk around the lower harbor early one morning. It was the 5th of July and the Marquette had hosted a 4th of July party down in the harbor area. It was interesting wandering around as volunteers were cleaning up and packing things up from the night before. As I wandered around I walked down one of the roads leading out to the docks. As I walked out I passed a metal building which had these interesting devices attached. They were several feet wide and looked like they would be used to spool something, but I have no idea what. I just liked the way they looked in the morning light.

When I shot the picture I was thinking about creating a black and white image. I liked the shadows created by the hard light and thought a high contrast image might look nice. I processed the image with Silver Efex Pro 2 which also imparted the ragged border. About the only other thing I did to the image was to crop it to make the curve of the geared wheel more of the subject. I also like the color version of the image and I might do something with it as well.

Feel free to leave comments or constructive feedback below.

Ringside

James Howe — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 17:09:09 +0000

(Nikon D700, 70-300mm at 195mm, ISO 200, 1/250 sec @ f/11)

Over the 4th of July weekend, I spent a couple of days in Marquette, Michigan. We were in Marquette to check out the campus of Northern Michigan University as a possible university for our youngest son. The town is quite interesting and has a number of interesting older buildings with some terrific architecture. When we got there, I took a short walk around the town. As I was wandering around town I saw this cool sign for Ringside Fitness, a local fitness facility and thought it would make a nice image. For processing I started with one of the darker presets from Silver Efex Pro 2 and gave the image a rough border. I wanted to give the image a bit of an old time grungy feeling.

Thoughts?

‘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.