More misty woodland

[LightandShadow]

Another go at trying to get the tones right in b&w. Maybe even less center of interest but the scene attracted me anyway.

[Rob Wood (Admin)]

Yeah, I like where you’re going with your black-and-white lately. Especially on this one. One thing to keep in mind with black-and-white is that brightness really really really draws the eye. Next tool for doing that is contrast which in practice means brightness next to very dark. In the saying that light misty area is really drawing my eye but I suspect it’s actually the dark trunks where you want my eye to fall. If on the other hand you want my eye to fall where the bright Missed actually is then you might want to further darken the left side of the image with a gradient tool and maybe even brighten up the Missed area which is perfectly valid too, just kind of depends how you want the composition to be.

Another thing to remember with black-and-white is that you only have tones to work with, and so you often need to push them a lot further than you would with colour photography. What feels like blasphemy it colour photography is kind of necessary in post producing black-and-white images. When I feel this way, I often cast back to when I was in a dark room developing black-and-white prints and I think people would be extremely surprised how far we pushed the dodging and burning. I guess my point with this is to not be afraid of really pushing those tones to where you want or need them when you are developing black-and-white images.

[LightandShadow]

For me, the attraction of this sort of scene is the fog and mist. I also generally want to preserve the texture in the dark tones. On this image, maybe I should worry less about the trunks since the lichen (bright bits) are visible.

As I go back through the picture in Lightroom, I have brightened the whites, the histogram showing overexposed. That really doesn’t matter here. I have also crushed the blacks. The result is that the dark mid-tones are now brighter than I wanted. I need to start all over again with it. I thought I could just add a bit of editing to what I already have but find that should have made another virtual copy before the “minor” edits that turned out to be not quite so minor. This is the sort of scene I love but usually wind up studying and then passing by because the photograph seldom conveys the feeling of being there.

[Rob Wood (Admin)]

I think trying to convey feelingly in photography is the ultimate challenge. we all try to do it and I think we all fail miserably in our own minds, but we keep going because that is what we want to do. to be honest I think this is a pretty damn good attempt at doing exactly what you were trying to do.

[LightandShadow]

Thank you. Looking at it now, I like it.

I remember the first time I saw a display of Anselm Adam’s prints. I was shocked at how dark they were, how much black.

[Rob Wood (Admin)]

I actually find it a really useful exercise to look at images I like as I’m editing my own photographs. It kind of always strikes me how far they push the postprocessing. Not that you may need permission, but it’s nice to see that you’re not an outlier sometimes.

[Patrick]

A very decent black and white mate , good one Steve 🙂

[Dahlia Ambrose]

Beautiful photo Steve, even if there is no prominent center of interest 🙂

[LightandShadow]

Thank you. I think the “interest” I want to convey is  “breath in, breath out” just be there. A sense of everything all at once. Or maybe I just don’t know what I was actually after.

[Dahlia Ambrose]

Yes a sense of just being there and relaxing 🙂

[Rob Wood (Admin)]

Yeah, I certainly get that sense from. But I’m kind of split on the idea that you need to have the image in your mind eye before you shoot the shot. I have a lot of examples of where I get a shot that I wasn’t expecting much from and it turns out brilliantly when I get it onto a screen and vice versa.

[LightandShadow]

Yep. Not an either/or but a sometimes this and other times that–or occasionally both. The envisioned works but, within the frame, there are sometimes other images lurking about, waiting to be discovered.

[Rob Wood (Admin)]

Yeah, that brings us onto the other issue that a lot of people think that a crop should be no more than a slight straightening of the image. Again, I think that’s purism that doesn’t really have a place in art.

[Patrick]

It’s the difference between documenting a scene and interpreting it. And in that simple truth lies the difference between a picture and a work of art.

[Author]

Posts