Best Laid Plans
Last week I finally completed my Quixotic adventure into the Elwha river valley. On my first trip up the valley, a pre-trip to sort out the route, gear, fishing, and logistics, I had envisioned capturing the trip in gritty B&W. Even though the valley is rich in subtle color and the weather was fine on both trips, internally, this felt like the best approach. I wanted to counterpoise this beauty with the realities of what was happening to the fisheries in the region as a result of the dam removal, and also perhaps reflect on some of the things going on in my own life.
In the last year or so, I’ve been thinking a lot about the entire process of print creation, from subject, to capture, to development, to printing. I have come to the conclusion that to evoke the artistic visions that certain subject creates in me, I needed to have the ability to change all parts of my process. To the point that for certain subjects I am trying to build cameras that will capture as much of that vision as possible in-camera. As more and more this becomes possible for any artist through digital post-processing, I am more and more driven to learn analog processes to communicate my visions. I have come to believe that for me, the process is part of the art.
I toyed a little with this in Singapore, trying to rescue a shoot where I could not resolve the subject matter with my mood. At any rate I had some success on our first trip, shooting TMAX 3200 ASA, but I wasn’t capturing the grain I wanted. And then it dawned on me. Sitting on my desk for a very long time is an old Canon EOS I have converted to a pinhole camera by putting a pinhole lens in a body cap.
Der pinhole
I had even gotten a few decent shots with it.
Lily Banfield
And after figuring out that my light meter will actually meter the pinhole shot.
Caroline (Jedi) Coffey
Yet, pinholes take a very long time to expose. However, combine the 3200ASA film with that camera and I could probably get some nice shots. It was certainly worth the try. Well, lets just say that out on the trail I had some technical difficulties, which is kind of a downer because lugging the second camera, tripod, and light meter probably added 6 lbs of the 55 lb pack. Not only did I not think it through and practice this enough (the 3200ASA + pinhole was a very late breaking epiphany), somehow the film had issues in development.
Mark Fishing
Big Foot fishing
I love the grain. Otherwise, I gots me some thinking to do. But the grain was the goal, so yeah team.
Oh, Yeah, I Did Say 2nd Camera
I also packed in my DSLR and 3 lenses: 12-24 wide angle zoom, 50mm macro, and 28-200 zoom, just in case. This probably added another 6 pounds to the pack, maybe more. (If my MF Mamiya hadn’t died an ignoble death, I’d’ve been figuring how to haul that 40lb kit in with me.) One nice thing about pinhole: no lenses to cart around.
I know, I know, I know. I need to stop treating my DSLR like an instamatic. For all the time and effort I take to shoot one shot with the Mamiya, you would think I would learn to get good photos with the Canon. As I’ve mentioned before I realized a while ago that over-exposing digital shots for post processing is counter productive if you are just going to post them without any changes (under exposed shots look more saturated and work well on the web), so I did bracket most of the shots for the trip. I’m trying.
One thing I quickly found fascinating is that taking a shot with a 55lb pack on is non-trivial. Between the physical strain of holding the camera balanced against the load and the fact my pulse was probably 150ish, all the shots I did at 1/30th of a second came out shaky. Also, my eyes are not what they used to be, so I can’t pick that out from the LCD on the back of the camera.
Combine that with the fact that I was really there to fish and was already doing my set shots with my pinhole, and the overall quality of the color digi shots is perhaps less than I would normally expect. Partly, I think I don’t work on the digital stuff so much because like many people I don’t print it. Somebody is going to spend 5 seconds looking at it on Facebook and move on. Whatever. I don’t even know how to get a print of a digital shot, and printing is what I’m all about!
But That’s Not What I’m Here to Talk About
I did get some interesting images, after all, even though the quality is not perhaps what it could’ve been. As I was sorting and editing them to post on FB, I did use Irfanview to make some crude B&W conversions. And what I noticed surprised me perhaps just a little.
Normally I compose a shot for it’s emotional value. I look for shape and texture, flow. Of course, when I’m shooting color, I look for color, but what really surprised me was how much of a component the color was in the shots. Almost none of the shots worked in B&W, even the ones with subtle colorations, where I thought the texture was the important aspect. In fact, the only shot I actually liked in B&W, the shot of the trip for me, was the only one I took where I thought “I wish I had the Mamiya for this shot.” In other words, the only one I wish I could’ve printed.
I’ll let you decide.
Mark in the distance
I almost never consciously take a shot for a given reason. I like it, I set it up and I take it. After, I can look at it critically and tell you why it “works.” In this shot the convergence of all the diagonal lines at the upper right phi point makes it. It draws you into the image. But the rich and subtle blue greens, emphasized by under exposure also work.
(Phi: People talk about the “rule of thirds” which I never consciously use, yet most great art will have something at at least one of the points of phi in the image. Phi works on the Golden Mean and probably deserves a blog in itself, but if you did divide and image into thirds horizontally and then vertically, the intersections of lines would roughly coincide to points of interest. )
Oh, hell. Let’s just try it.
Huh
For some reason Snagit is giving me fits. Anyway, look at that. I used a ruler on the screen to draw the lines. A few people have commented that they really like this picture. You have to look closely to even see Mark in the upper right. But, the rocks, the tree, the white water, and the bank do converge in that upper right focal point with nearly mathematical precision. I swear, I randomly picked this picture as the first in the gallery. With that, you would think (I would think) that color has very little to do with this image’s efficacy. And yet….
Cry me a river
I find this less compelling. (And Mark is practically gone.) Not that there aren’t things I couldn’t do in the dark room to work on this, but I simply wouldn’t bother. It doesn’t move me. (Although on 3rd and 4th views, I might be convinced…I like the trees up top.)
It goes on.
When I took this, I was drawn buy the abstractness of scale, the texture, and the subtly wild (can I say that)? colors. You would think that with all of that muscular motion in the rock this shot would love B&W, or B&W would love this shot.
Unrequited love
Not only does it not work, it is not nearly as luminous in B&W. I would’ve expected that to translate.
And more of that ilk.
Here is an interesting shot. I took this specifically to show that the fish in the main stem of the Elwha have almost none of the typical green coloration of a rainbow trout. When I converted it to B&W, I at first mixed them up.
(As an aside, compare this to a fish I caught just a few miles away in a tributary, which I later learned was stocked with a separate strain of fish, why I could not tell you:
Lillian 'bow
)
Although I have gorgeous B&W mushroom shots, some of my favorite shots, none of the ones I took on this trip converted well at all.
I was especially surprised about the staghorn moss which I thought would really convert well. I once did an entire photo shoot of staghorn.
Oh, oh, this one is beginning to grow a little on me too, as I edit the post. That’s good, right?
This shot screamed luminosity to me.
But it fell on deaf ears. This is a great example of the Zone System, had I shot that on film I would carefully have put the high lights on Zone 7, over-exposing by two more stops than the color version and gotten them to look white and not pallid grey.
I did get some interesting conversions of fish shots, but I would consider it compounded errors because I couldn’t find my polarizing filter, and that added to the “oil slick” effect. Still, on film…I might just print that.
And I rotated it. So there.
This was the only one I wished I had on Medium Format
I actually made it my FB avatar, even though it doesn’t quite show what I was aiming for, which was the standing wave behind the rock being about a foot above the water in front.
A sharp eye would notice that these are actually not the same exposure. The same image in B&W, not so good. That is a subtle and power lesson on what can make or break a shot.
So much like the hike, I rambled, perhaps stumbled, through this post. I did learn that innately I must think differently when I shoot in color. The effects of luminosity, contrast, texture and other aspects that draw me to a shot I would print are not the same as the digital snapshots I take. It was a revelation.
gointothelight 
Rob
October 8, 2011
I think the reason why most of these images look better in colour is that you were shooting and a time (and/or place) where there is this beautiful blue hue that adds a lovely atmosphere to your images, which is lost when converting to black and white. Similarly, the rocks in your first few images also contain a greenish moss and a golden ore of some kind (I’m guessing maybe iron but geology is not one of my strong points), which contrast the blue hue almost perfectly (see the ‘orange and teal’ school of motion picture colour grading).
Whenever I convert a photograph into black and white, it is to usually bring out a feature or element that would otherwise be lost amongst the colour, often something that is brought out by the increased contrast that B&W can bring (such as this image where I’ve used it to bring out the texture of the rocks and the splashes of water).
B&W can also obviously be used to create a sense of atmosphere, but in the case of many of these images the atmosphere comes from the colour.
How much post-processing are you doing when you convert to black and white? Admittedly when I convert an image into B&W it’s almost always an afterthought, a decision taken whilst reviewing the pictures at home after the shoot is over, but whenever I convert I find I have to tweak the exposure, brightness and contrast in order to keep the image from looking a little washed out or dull (or occasionally dark and underexposed, depending on the shot). Both the staghorn shot and the image after look like they could benefit from a bit of such adjustments (blasphemeous, I know).
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jontobey
January 12, 2012
I don’t know why I’m not getting your comments unless I go looking for them.
I don’t think post-processing is blasphemous, the darkroom is all about post processing.
After I did this post I did one on B&W HDR film vs. digital and I realized the issue isn’t so much about the post processing, as it is that film just captures so much more information. I simply cannot get the same shot digitally. Did you get a chance to read that post? It was a real revelation for me.
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Rob
January 12, 2012
It’s weird that you’re not getting my comments – I get an email any time someone leaves a comment on my blog, unless it is flagged as spam. Maybe there’s a setting not set right, or maybe your blog just hates me?
I did read the post in question; I guess it must have helped at some level because since then I have been more aware of exposures, metering, and have even been trying HDR with some success. I do have some luck creating a sort of faux HDR in my processing software, as it allows me to adjust the brightness and contrast of the brightest and darkest parts of the image separately, giving me the option of deepening shadows or reducing the ‘blowout’ in the highlights. As I shoot raw, I do find in most conditions I have +/-2 in usable exposure correction unless I’m in really dark conditions (in which cases the noise is usually too bad for a decent photo). How that equates to film I can’t really say, I’ve not used a film camera since I was about twelve, and that was a Pentax point-and-shoot number.
My ‘blasphemous’ comment was in reference to me shooting in digital colour and converting it to look closer to your black and white film shots with a fraction of the effort you put in!
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jontobey
October 22, 2011
Rob, so sorry I just came across your comment!
I don’t post process. Well, I don’t digitally post process. I simply don’t have the tools, or the inclination. Most of the B&W on my site is straight scans. My thing is the print, and my post-processing is done in the darkroom. I scan to see if the composition or other aspects make an image worth printing, and if so, I go into the darkroom. Even on my About page, I’m pretty unapologetic about the quality of my scans. It’s almost as if the dust, hair, beer stains, etc are reminders that THIS IS NOT THE PRODUCT.
However, I do want to be very clear that the Zone System and B&W darkroom work is ALL ABOUT (sorry no italics here) post processing. It’s precisely about knowing exactly how you are going to post process an image in development and printing to achieve what you envisioned. There is no sacrilege here. Before Photoshop, B&W always had the advantage over color in that it was much easier to post process, giving the artist much more latitude.
That said, my take away from that post was that when I’m thinking about taking an image that will be a print, I have all of that process thought out, from composition to contrast and luminosity. So the brain fungus (I just love even typing that) would’ve probably made a really nice B&W photo had I properly used the Zone system to expose it for B&W. I agree the staghorn moss does have possibilities. I shot a whole roll of it at one point before I realized my camera was broken and the mirror was not popping up out of the way.
So, the point, for me, is that when I converted these images as you say “as an after thought,” they pretty much failed because the post processing considerations were not in place. That said, I’m really surprised that the muscular rocks didn’t magically work out.
As for the blue light, a good digital photographer would probably have corrected for that. But I agree it adds atmosphere. It’s a steep, narrow valley with only a few hours of sun at the bottom.
Thank you so much for taking the time to comment!
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