It’s April Fools Day and I’m not talking about any tricks today. Instead I;m talking about one of my favorite subjects—black and white photography.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.”– Mark Twain
Helmut Newton once said that, The whole series is black-and-white, so when I went to shoot one of the women I only had black-and-white film with me. She had reddish hair and was a very pretty girl, a nice girl.” I think he had a point!
When I find myself wondering, “what do I shoot next?” or start to think “there’s nothing to photograph,” I like to shoot some images in direct monochrome mode. It doesn’t have to be all of the images that get made during a particular photo session; maybe just a few to, you know, see what happens. But what if you change your mind and really really want that original at some later date to be in color?
RAW+JPEG
Most DSLRs and mirrorless cameras have a RAW+JPEG option that lets you capture a monochrome (JPEG) and color (RAW) file at the same time. Some dual-memory card slot cameras, will let you simultaneously save each file type to a different card. This approach means that you get to use the JPEG file as a digital proof that you can show the subject but have a color RAW file that you can retouch and process into black and white.
One of the biggest advantaged of having that color RAW files i that when shooting portraits, many retouching tools, including Imagenomic’s’ Portraiture, work better with color files than black and white ones. So more often than not when making portraits in the studio, like the one at left, I shoot (RAW + JPEG) and convert the color file to monochrome later using Adobe Photoshop and Silver Efex Pro.
How I Made This Photograph: This image was made for an unpublished review of the Canon EOS Rebel T4i that I originally wrote for the print edition of Shutterbug magazine. It was unpublished because the editor sat on the story—although it was filed when the camera was brand new—for so long that Canon replaced it with the new EOS Rebel T5! Don’t even talk about what I got paid or didn’t get paid for the original review.
I’ve always been a fan of Canon’s Picture Styles and used the T4i’s Monochrome mode to capture this image of a locomotive’s drivers (they’re not wheels) at the Colorado Railroad Museum. The image was made using a Tamron AF 18-270mm f/3.5-6.3 Di II VC LD Aspherical IF lens (at 200mm.) The Aperture Preferred exposure was 1/50sec at f/8 and ISO 200.
Copies of my book Creative Digital Monochrome Effects is available from Amazon with new copies selling for $11.46 and used copies starting around eight bucks, way less than a trenta Pumpkin Spice Frappuccino at your local Starbucks drive-through. No Kindle version of the book was ever available, sorry