| 1/10 | f5.6 | ISO 1600 | 20mm | RAW |
My wife, Rachel, has been encouraging me recently to do black and white photography, and this is my first attempt at accepting her challenge. Please let me know what you think of the shot.
I am by no means an expert on black and white photography, so I won't be offering much along the lines of tips for this kind of photography. It's something new to me, and it's always good to step out of your comfort zone and be willing to make mistakes as you learn something new. It's a great way to become a better photographer.
There was one really challenging aspect to this photo. One-tenth of a second is really slow (even for my IS lens, which helps offset camera shake at slow shutter speeds), and I didn't have a tripod. So what did I do? I braced myself to be as still as possible and then held down the shutter button to fire off several shots in succession. Out of the five shots taken, this is the middle one and it came out crystal clear. The others were all a little blurry.
I tried to frame the shot a little bit by having the solid brick wall on the left and the tall shrubbery on the right. This allows the curvature of the store fronts go three-quarters of the way into the photo, but prevents it from reaching the edge. This helps keep the viewers eye in the photo.
This was shot after 9 p.m. on a Monday night, so most of the shops were closed and few patrons were walking around. I might go back on a Friday or Saturday night and try this again with several pedestrians walking through the photo.
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4 comments:
Chris
This is pretty good for digital black and white. You have White, gray, and black. You are missing some detail in the light white; however that is a limitation of Digital Vs B/W Film. So Good job working with what you have.
With that set aside, one thing I don’t like about the picture is the hand rails in the front, they stand out to much and I don’t think that was your main subject of the picture and compared to everything else they are boring maybe just burn them out in photoshop?
I don't like the hand rails, either. When I talked about going back to retake the photo on a busier night, one think I had in mind was to have some people standing at the rails to help hide them.
As for using Photoshop to get rid of them, I am trying to avoid using Photoshop for anything other than tweaking an image (contrast, color, cropping, etc.). Part of it is I don't have the time to do anything more than that, and another part of it is I am trying to get better at getting things done right the moment the image is captured.
a little burning and dodging isn't a bad thing in black and white photography. Even Ansel Adams burned and dodged his famous picture of Half Dome and many other pictures, including a picture of a temple in Manti, Utah.
Yes over photoshoping something is a bad thing.. but a little bit isn’t bad. With black and white burning and dodging is a selective way to adjust the contrast.
Great shot!! Even before I read what it was about, I liked it. Look forward to more B&W.
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