B&W
They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Fortunately, I’m a cat person.
Thanks to some posts from a colleague in the photography group I participate in via Zoom, I was reminded that black and white photography can be fantastic and that I almost never do it. So I thought I’d give it a try this week, and I took a walk around our yard looking for opportunities.
In case you’re interested, The Photographic Eye is led by Alex Kilbee, who you can see on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/thephotographiceye. The TPE group is a paid subscription to https://www.skool.com/thephotographiceye.
From our deck
Maybe a bit more about landsacape?
And this a bit more about color?
In my experience most professional and artistic landscapes are in b&w. Maybe that’s the Ansel Adams influence or maybe I just don’t get out enough.
I don’t know if I can even call this a landscape with all the clouds, but I don’t know what else to call it. I like both, but I find them to be very different, and I prefer the color. I’m curious what others think.
Weeds
I almost got the impression of filaments that I wanted, and I think the b&w is considerably closer to what I was trying for. Now that I see it in a smaller format I think the post is a distraction, not an addition.
Muddled and confused thanks to yellow-brown color similarity and irrelevant green.
This works but for me the color version is better.
I think this is my favorite, and color works here because I got the yellow-brown weed against the dark trunks.
Through the branches
I think this one works, and it definitely works best in b&w. I wanted the most important elements to be the mountains, trees, and branches. In color, the man-made objects are much more distracting than they are here. I should try this again with a less dramatic f-stop.
So I liked this shrub …
This only sort of works, but it’s a heck of a lot better in b&w than in color. I wanted to highlight the shrub in the foreground. If you think it gets lost here you should see it in color. I definitely didn’t get what I was aiming for, but I like the photo anyhow. I had the shrub in the lower right, which actually served better to highlight it, but needed to crop out a lot of ugly distraction. I’ll have to try again, positioning myself differently.
Arroyo
This is pretty much a throwaway shot of our arroyo. Somehow b&w makes it less boring than color. I can aspire to figuring out how to make this actually a good shot. Also, I don’t know who sneezed on my lens or my sensor, but apologies for the splotches at the top. I’ll try to clean this up and replace it later.
Be warned
Using b&w here brings out the sign. In color there are a lot of distractions, and the text stands out less against the background.
Puddle over the wood pile
The brown tarp detracts from the image in color. It was a difficult choice, though, because the blue sky is nice.
Another trick I often don’t think to use is inversion. I think this image is more interesting than the original.
Through the window glass
This deliberate bit of confusion was shot through the corner of our house. It doesn’t work at all in b&w because you need the color cues to have any hope of making sense of it. If nothing else, it’s an interesting abstract.