Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.” — Emile Zola
I recently noticed a trend on this Blog. Even though only some of each month’s posts were about or featured black and white photographs—obviously that includes Monochrome Monday— it turned out that these were also some of the most popular ones. I think I can understand why.
Sometimes color can confuse a viewer removing the focus from the photograph’s actual subject. I also think that some black and white images, such as cityscapes as seen in my own attempts at doing some urban photography have more drama when seen in monochrome. Without a blue sky to distract a viewer clouds can “pop” creating a more exciting look particularly in infrared landscape photography.
It’s All Black and White to Me
One of the things I like to do to get myself out of a rut is to shoot photographs in monochrome. It doesn’t have to be all of the images that I make during a session; maybe just a few.
These days, when shooting in direct monochrome mode I’ll use a “belt and suspender” method to give me options for processing later on. Most cameras offer a RAW+JPEG option that lets you capture a monochrome (JPEG) and color (RAW) file at the same time, while displaying a black & white image in the EVF and LCD. Capturing images in color to convert to monochrome later in the digital darkroom can be a good idea. Some dual memory card cameras let you copy JPEGs to one card and RAW to another. It’s the main reasons I like the RAW+JPEG capture option.
How I Made this shot: I made this image of one of the two small Galloping Goose locomotives in the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden, Colorado. From time to time the museum put the Geese to work and run them on their tracks and I was lucky to get a ride on one of them. It was quite the experience. You see…
Galloping Goose was a name given to a series of seven railcars that were built in the 1930s by the Rio Grande Southern Railroad (RGS) and operated until the early 1950s. They were based on full-sized automobiles, not stem locomotives. There was not enough passenger or cargo income to justify continuing the expensive steam train service at then-current levels so RGS developed the first of the “geese” as a way to keep its contract to run mail into towns into Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. This cost saving meant that the first Goose was paid off and making a profit within three weeks of going into service.
This photograph was made with a six-megapixel Pentax K100D and Schneider D-Xenon 50-200mm F4-5.6 (at 200mm) to produce the maximum image compression with this lens. The exposure was 1/250 sec at f/13 and ISO 200. The JPEG color file, made before my now standard RAW+JPEG regimen, was converted to monochrome in Silver Efex using their Full Spectrum preset with tweaks of their Burn Edges and Vignette controls as well as light tweaking of the interface’s Brightness and Contrast slider. I was temped to add some Platinum toning from PhotoKit but remembered my mentor, Eddie Bafford’s admonition, to control myself when working in the darkroom, digital or not it seems.
The Colorado Railroad Museum is open Tuesday-Sunday 9:00 AM.to 5:00 PM rain or shine or snow and is closed on Mondays. It’s also closed for Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Years Eve and New Years Day.
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Copes of my book Creative Digital Monochrome Effects are available from Amazon for $19.03 with used copies starting at affordable prices—around seven bucks—right now. Pick up a copy now while they’re cheaper than your next “cup of joe” at Starbucks.