Black & White

Even in the modern digital age black & photography still has a magical appeal to many people and can dramatically change the drama and impact of a photograph. Many of the modern digital SLR cameras have pre-set settings to generate black & white or sepia toned pictures to offer this capability but a far better way to do this is to do this in the post-processing phase.

I always take RAW format photos which allows me the ability to do some post-processing adjustments where needed such as exposure, white balance, etc. Although these RAW images are full colour, using a powerful black & white post processing software such as Silver Efex Pro from Nik Software, I can generate a large variety of black & white image effects.

Silver Efex Pro offers the power to control professional quality black & white images with patented U-Point technology to selectively control tonality and contrast in the image, a state-of-the-art grain engine to recreate traditional style black & white images, emulation of many popular film types and stylizing of images with popular tints and toners.

Let's look at how we do the black & white processing .... here is an original colour image of the famous Taj Mahal at Agra in India.

Silver Efex Pro is a plug-in to Aperture so we simply select Images, Edit With, Silver Efex Pro to bring up the application.

The default view is as below with a neutral black & white effect.

Or we can split the screen with the original colour and black & white effect.

We can then choose a number of pre-set effects from the left hand column, such as the High Structure effect as shown here.

Here are another two examples:

Dark Sepia

Antique Plate

Alternatively we can change the individual settings for brightness, contrast, structure, colour filters, film types or stylizing. We can adjust grain to reproduce an "antique" film effect. We can also add in control points to adjust brightness, contrast and structure in specific areas of the image which can be useful for example to reduce blown-out areas as shown in the example below where the top right of the Taj Mahal dome is over exposed. Each control point has individual sliders for brightness, contrast and structure as well as the area of influence.

The finished image produces a dramatic black & white effect as seen below.

Panoramic Photography

Panoramic photography has always been one of my interests and usually there are numerous opportunities to use this technique to highlight a dramatic view or landscape which normally cannot be captured within the limitations of a one frame shot. During a recent visit to Paris I took an early evening walk by the famous Louvre Museum which was beautifully lit up illuminating the wonderful contrast of the famous glass pyramid with the backdrop of the older architecture of the museum buildings; an ideal candidate for a panorama.

I shot 8 individual frames covering the extent of the buildings using an approximate 25% overlap between frames using an ISO of 800.

After running through my basic workflow in Aperture I exported the 8 frames as full resolution jpeg files and then imported these into Kekus Digital's Calico 1.4rev2 application where the frames where interpolated, blended and then merged into a horizontal panorama as shown below.

Here is another typical landscape which can be an ideal opportunity to create a dramatic panorama. These 5 shots were taken at Suances on the northern Atlantic coast of Spain all taken at ISO100.

Again after post-processing through Aperture the 5 frames were exported as jpegs, imported into Kekus Digital's Calico 1.4rev2 application where the frames where interpolated, blended and then merged into a horizontal panorama.

Calico software is an automatic multi-row photo stitcher application. Calico was developed with ease of use in mind and unlike many other stitching programs, does not limit you to a single row of images or a 3x3 mosaic. With Calico, you can shoot several rows of images or a single row.

Photo Tip - Motion Effect

On a recent holiday in Spain I came across a lovely old merry-go-round at the beachfront in San Sebastian which was a great subject for a photo. Thinking a little creatively I wanted to capture the sense of motion so dialed in a slow shutter speed to my camera. Problem ..... this was mid-day and extremely bright so even at the smallest f22 aperture the shot was completely blown out and overexposed. I abandoned these shots and assumed them to be in the reject category - luckily I never usually delete any shots on the camera.
I forgot about the merry-go-round shots I had taken until later when post-processing my holiday photos I came across the completely blown-out merry-go-round shot as shown here.

Going through my normal Aperture workflow, and out of curiosity, I grabbed the exposure slider and pulled this back dialing in a -2.00 EV value and miraculously managed to pull out a reasonable picture highlighting the merry-go-round movement as I had wanted.

This shows the advantages of using RAW format when taking photos allowing you the ability to adjust key parameters such as exposure in the post-processing phase.