streak of light...

April, week one:
There's a great little crêperie in downtown Charlottesville, in a tiny little brick building. You just walk up to the little window, get your food, and eat it on the patio out front. Unfortunately they are closed on Monday's so I couldn't get a crêpe but i was able to get some cool pictures. Making use of my handy-dandy tripod, I was able to get some extended-exposure shots with cars driving by leaving streaks of their lights. A trick I learned is that you often get a better effect if you can time it so that you only have cars driving away from you... the red tail-lights don't over-expose as easily as headlights do, and you get the added advantage of their headlights illuminating some of the subject. That worked well here. This image addresses a large number of my goals for this project... more than any other single image to date (although admittedly "action" is questionable).

The black and white conversion process wasn't very complicated, although because of the detail I wanted in the bricks I did a little bit more sharpening after resizing than I normally do (USM with 200% instead of 150%, still at 0.5 pixels). Also, since the image was slightly under-exposed, the total percentage for the various channels in channel mixer added up to 110%, followed by a slight boost to brightness and contrast. Doing this in post-processing, as opposed to getting full exposure with the original image, kept the street-lamps from being too blown-out. Lastly, I toyed around with an asymmetric border... I hadn't ever tried this before, but I really like the way it turned out. I need to experiment with this more to try and maximize the impact the borders can have.

Image details:
Date and location: 4/2/7 at 20:47 EDT, downtown, Charlottesville, VA
Equipment: Canon 30D, 17-85mm IS lens, Hoya SMC UV filter
Settings: 28mm, tripod, ISO 100, f/4.5, 5.0 sec, (pattern metering ; - 1.0 EV) shot in raw
Processing: raw conversion in Aperture v1.5.2, export as .jpg -> photoshop -> USM (200%, 0.5, 0) -> monochrome channel mixer (50, 50, 10, 0) -> crop -> resize -> USM (200%, 0.5, 0) -> brightness +10 & contrast +20 -> border + text -> save for web
Photo-a-week goals addressed: #1 (b+w), #6 (extended exposure), #7 (night photography), #9 (action), #11 (architecture), #16 (street photography)

black and white in blue...

January, week two:
I went for a hike last weekend along the whiteoak canyon trail in Shenandoah National Park. At the end of the hike (4.6 miles out and back, approximately 1200 foot elevation change) there was an amazing 86 foot high waterfall, the second highest in the park. It was a great day for a hike, and on the way back I took this photo from a footbridge about 200 yards upstream of the main falls.

While I really liked a lot of my images of the falls, I think this one looks better in black and white than one of the entire falls. I feel this way because I like the texture of the rocks, water, and trees that this provides, and these characteristics would have been lost on a distant view of a tall falls.

My camera was on a tripod placed on the middle of a small footbridge crossing over the stream (which as stated is shortly before it makes it's big drop). I used a polarizing filter, mostly because I wanted to extend the exposure to get maximum blurring of the moving water... this was necessary since I was stopped down all the way (f/32) and don't have any neutral density filters.

As for the conversion, processing shots for my first submission (fractured limb) was the first time i played with "channel mixer" in photoshop as a method of black and white conversion. I love the flexibility it offers, but I am still learning. Nearly everything I had been converting started at something like 100% red, 40 to 50% green, -10 to 0% blue, and -25 to 0% constant, and i tweaked it from there. That worked ok, but then I learned a trick to start off by looking at each of the three channels at 100% with the others at 0% to see what that channel's information looked like. I had been frustrated with the 100/40/0/-10 settings and all subtle modifications, so it was eye-opening to do it this other way. It turned out that I liked the way the 100% blue and 0% everything else looked, so I went with it. I could probably tweak it some to improve it, but I wanted to go with it this way because it represents a new step in my digital black and white experience; last week I started using channel mixer, this week I started shaking things up... can't wait to see what comes next! Also, blue is my favorite color, so I liked being able to use just the blue channel. That is where the title of this blog entry comes from, "black and white in blue" (the original title i gave to the photo itself is "Whiteoak cascades")

Image details:
Date and location: 1/6/7 at 14:15 EST, Whiteoak Canyon Trail, Shenandoah NP, Virginia
Equipment: Canon 30D, 17-85mm IS lens, circular polarizing filter
Settings: 56mm, tripod, ISO 100, f/32, 3.2 sec, shot in raw
Processing: raw to tiff in lightroom beta v4.1, b+w in PS7 (channel mixer 0,0,100,0%)
Photo-a-week goals addressed: #1 (b+w), #6 (extended exposure)