Classic and Moody

My three favourite photographers — Dad, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ansel Adams — all worked with black and white film and all three achieved spectacular results and created impressive bodies of fine art photography.  True that, when these gents began shooting, colour film was either a thing of the future or a very unreliable medium.  Even when colour film became widely available and easily affordable, Dad carried two cameras, his “good” box loaded with black and white film, and his “extra” box, loaded with colour.  Whenever he encountered something really wonderful that he wanted to capture, Dad would always reach for his black and white first.  I grew up watching him work his magic in our darkroom, so my first love was monochromatic images.

Recently I’ve been following Leanne Cole — both her blog and her YouTube channel — and, through her creativity, my interest in black and white images has reignited.  One of Leanne’s specialties is converting her beautiful, macro, flower images to monochrome.  So many times I catch myself noticing so many more details when colour is removed from the equation, so…

During the winter months I always like to have a photography project that doesn’t rely upon outings.  This winter, I’m going to work on converting a series of my own flower photographs to black and white and see what pops for me — shape/form, light/shadow, texture, etc.

Stuck at home today, I decided to play with a few images.  Quite often my dissatisfaction with a shot is the amount of distraction and it has occurred to me that much of that is due to too many or too vibrant colours.  I chose five images in which the colour was troubling to me and, using only the Intensity, Neutrals, Tone, and Grain sliders in Apple’s Photos, this is what happened:

This is the hawk tower at Holiday Beach Conservation Area.  It looks out over an enormous wetland and, come autumn, it is the best (bar none!) spot to watch and shoot migrating hawks and other raptors.  Plus the experience of being up so high, head amongst the clouds, so to speak, increases one’s enjoyment manifold!  In the original image, the colours of both the car and the trash can were jarring.  I know lots of photographers remove unpleasant details, but that particular skill is not yet in my tool box.

One of my favourite Essex destinations so far has been Lighthouse Cove, a tiny hamlet on the south shore of Lake St. Clair, about fifty kilometres north of my town,  Kingsville.  The Lighthouse Conservation Area, a one-hectare park located at the mouth of the Thames River, is home to the two-hundred year old lighthouse, one of the three oldest on the Great Lakes. Between signage and peculiar house and boathouse colours, the lighthouse was not the most significant part of the image.  I think it is much better now.

Essex is the greenhouse capital of Canada, perhaps even the whole of North America.  The size of these structures, and the vast number of them, all in one small county, is astounding.  This new build is on Kingsville Road 3, a route we use very often, so we’ve enjoyed watching this one go up.  In the original picture, the colours of the crops, wildflowers, grasses and woodland all distracted from the building’s skeleton.

This is one of two channels by which the fishing fleets and other boats access The Port of Wheatley from Lake Erie.  Everything in the shot was brightly coloured — the boats, the flags, the sky, the truck, the signs.  To my eye, it is much more pleasing as a monochromatic image.  

Between the power plant in the foreground, the water, the sky, the cranes, the industrial complexes and the vegetation, this shot had forty-plus, very distracting colours.  This is the new Gordie Howe International Bridge during construction.  This is another project we thoroughly enjoyed watching.  I like the shot so much better without colour, but now I need to figure out some of those sliders to get the tones just right.  

Obviously, my body of black and white images is a work in progress and my skill needs improvement, but I really enjoyed the process and pleasure is half the battle towards learning any new skill.

Classic and Moody

Goodbye to the blues and the bright chartreuse green,
I’m washing the color right out of this scene.
No Photoshop pricing, no subscription fees,
Just me and my MacBook, doing what we please!

With a swipe and a slide, the shadows get deep,
While the rest of the world is staying asleep.
It’s classic, it’s moody, it’s entirely brand new—
Who knew black and white could outshine every hue?

’Til next time, y’all…