For the love of black and white

This topic has been very prominent lately amongst my photographer friends. So I'm dedicating this post to Cat. Thanks for being a source of never ending information and support, you're a great friend!

With digital technology we have the capabilities to convert our DSLR images to what ever we want. What used to either take different films or different cameras is now just a change of a setting away, how awesome is that? Project #3 in class was to focus on a colored image and convert it into black and white or as it's now referred to "grey scale".

If rendered properly we can create an excellent image with depth of tone that film shooters simply cannot and with no extra equipment! The best way to convert a colored image into grey scale is not to turn on the grey scale or B&W button, instead we need to get into something which controls each tone individually. Because I work with CS3 that is all I can explain but I"m sure other programs have similar options. The class was shown to convert into grey scale by using the channel mixer.

There are several presets that allow you to quickly convert with several different filters but we were encouraged to convert manually. By clicking the monochrome box we go into a custom setting. From there you can slide the red, green and blue tones back and forth until you get something that pleases you. As a rule of thumb a balanced image should always be at 100%. That means that the red, green and blue tones all have to average 100. Of course this is completely subjective!

One thing that was repeated was how you cannot save a bad image by just converting it into grey scale. A bad image is just that, bad. Without proper composition, tonality and a story behind the image you have nothing to work with. If the tones of the picture are poor then converting it will only emphasize that and we saw a couple of great examples in our critiques today in class! It was very interesting because several students had the original color image too, and some images just looked great in color and when they were converted they lost that "oomph" factor. One or two pictures just popped when they were transferred or where so compelling as images to begin with that you didn't even miss the color. I really wish I could share the whole classes images and show you what I'm talking about... a picture is worth a million words after all, right?!

Well with out further ado here are my before and after images. Let my pictures speak for themselves. Please feel free to leave comments, thoughts, or just some love (try not to leave any hate but do so if you must).


my original shot of a carousel horse at Balboa Park


greyscale conversion

Hopefully my image gained something from the conversion. To me it does, but it's my image so of course I think it does! I also cropped out a lot of what I felt was distracting in the image. I didn't like the safety rails around the edge of the steps. For me it was just too busy to work with and added nothing over all to the story. What is the story by the way? Well, that's up to the viewer. For me, this showed movement without progression. The horse is always in a state of perpetual movement, spinning around and around but he never goes anywhere, he's stuck in a rut or on a carousel to be exact! Could be very symbolic of life but I'm not going to pretend I shot that for that reason... I like the horse and thought it was pretty!

There was one thing we were all confused about though... why is the mane of the horse is blowing towards the front while the horse is obviously moving in that same direction?? Do you think the artist was confused? The rest of the details are obviously blowing back. I won't pretend to know a lot about horses manes but they usually go the other way right? Also, to explain the horses terrified expression, the animal directly behind him is a lion so he's scared of a bite on the booty! (So I guess that adds more to the story right? The horse is life, scared of getting bit on the booty!!)