The Citroën DS was a front mid-engined, front-wheel drive car that was manufactured from 1955 to 1975 in sedan, wagon and convertible configurations. Italian sculptor and industrial designer Flaminio Bertoni and French aeronautical engineer André Lefèbvre styled and engineered the DS and Paul Magès developed the unique hydropneumatic self-levelling suspension. One of my photographer friends owned two Citroen DS automobiles; one to drive and a back up for when the other one was in the shop, which was often.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“Black and white photography is truly quite a ‘departure from reality and the transition from one aspect of visual magic to another was not as complete as many imagine.” – Ansel Adams
One of the reasons purists refer to black and white images as monochrome is because it’s a more precise term that also covers images that are made in sepia and other tones. But there’s more to monochrome photography than simply an absence of color.
One of the advantages of creating monochromatic digital photographs is that, unlike when shooting film, the original image can come from different capture options. Some digital cameras have direct monochrome modes and these images are captured in RGB mode. so it’s a color image file without any color! Traditionalists may call it monochrome while digital imagers may prefer grayscale, but, to paraphrase Billy Joel, “it’s still black and white to me.”
The RAW+JPEG Option
Most digital cameras have a RAW+JPEG capture option that let you, after selecting monochrome mode, capture a black and white (JPEG) and color (RAW) file at the same time. Cameras with dual-memory card slots also let you capture each file type onto a different card. This means you get to use the JPEG file as a digital proof that you can show a client (or yourself) while having a color RAW file you can later process into black and white. This is something my co-host Barry Staver and I discuss in the Bastille Day edition of our latest Pixels, Grain and Cookies podcast.
For portraits: One of the biggest advantaged of starting with a color RAW file is that most retouching software works better with color files than monochrome ones. When I make portraits in the studio, I’ll shoot RAW + JPEG and show the model the black and white JPEG as a proof and then convert the color RAW file to monochrome using softwar such as Silver Efex. To see a direct comparison between monochrome and color versions of the same image.check out my post Creating Glamour Photographs in Black and White when yiu have the time.00
For cars…
How I Made this Photograph: The original color image file (above right) of this 1972 Citroën DS was made at Cars & Coffee in Parker, Colorado using my Canon EOS M6 Mark II that Canon discontinued but you can still make photographs with it. The lens was the EF-M15-45mm f/3.5-6.3 IS STM kit lens I use to make all of my recent movie review videos for my YouTube channel. The exposure was1/400 sec at f/10 and ISO 320, which is my standard ISO setting for car shows.
In this case, the original color JPEG file was converted to monochrome using Silver Efex’s “013 Grad ND (EV-1)” preset that was tweaked slightly using the plug-in’s sliders. I typically push the Grain per Pixel slider all the way to the right and the Soft/Hard slider all the way to the left to minimize grain or noise.
The inspiration for the monochrome conversion was, not surprisingly, a movie. In this case it was Alphaville, a 1965 French New Wave science fiction neo-noir film that was directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Although, to be fair, there were also American cars in the movie including a Ford Mustang and even a Plymouth Valiant as well as French cars from Simca and Peugeot.
Copies of my book Creative Digital Monochrome Effects is available from Amazon with new copies selling for $26.18 and used copies starting around six bucks, less than a grande Pumpkin Spice Frappuccino at your local Starbucks drive-through. No Kindle version of the book was ever available, sorry