Welcome!

[Gare]

The World in Black and White is our board that gets into the finer points of monochrome photography, which is doing fine and well in the 21st Century, thank you.

Gary Eden is your moderator (I'm just introducing him here); Gary is the photographer's photographer--although he uses a digital camera, most of the astounding stuff you can see on his gallery was shot with a film camera and then the negs were scanned.

Every time I see a new Eden photo, I'm amazed not only at composition, but the zones he gets. Gary, please let others share your fire and field any questions on film brand, speed, custom developing, equipment, what got you interested...well, you get the picture!

My Best,

The Other Gary

[geden3]

Well that was quite an intro Gare.   Hopefully we can get some good photography discusions going.   Just to let everyone here know me and my background I started in music and played in a band with Gary for an era.  I decided to go to school and took up chemistry.  Besides music I really got into photography back in 1980 when I got my first SLR.  I learned as I went along mostly doing color. The photography school of hard knocks  .  For me photography is an expression of how you feel just like music.  A lot of pro photographers have said it's a lifestyle and for many that may be true but I tend to think of it more as inner feeling that need to be expressed.  I know if I'm not in a good mood I can't get good images. It just doesn't happen. I started doing more B&W images the past few years.  I love color but I have also found that B&W changes the way you see and think. It's different. It makes you see and focus on things  that many times go unnoticed.  One thing I have learned is take your time and think before pressing the shutter.  Todays digital cameras can record hundreds of images in a short time but if you don't take your time you can have 234 just so so images instead of taking the time to think and get 2 really good shots out of 5.   And another thing I learned is even though equipment takes the pictures it's the photographer that makes the images.  Equipment is just the tool.  Your eyes and mind make or break the image.  Let's have fun 

Freps
Gary E

P.S.  You can call me Frog which was my nickname in the band   :confused:

[Gare]

Hey, Gare--

Dug a thought out I thought I'd share here. I took photography in college a million years ago, and the instructor, T.R. Richards (who was a Life magazine stringer in the 1960s), had us only working in black and white for the first semester, to get us to think and "see" in monochrome. If you can mentally remove colors from a scene in your viewfinder, you can better concentrate on composition--color then becomes a separate compositional element.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, my fist printer was an HP laserjet, so I designed stuff in grayscale to match output. The experience really did help teach me, "composition first, color second".

Frog??? Pratt called you that; Pat 'n' I never did!

My Best,

Gare

[geden3]

Yeah I think thats true regarding color.  It really is a separate element in the image.  At times you can use that color as a balance of composition just like you can use a shape.  B&W is an image of just brightness and contrast.  That's all it has. Color has brightness, contrast but now a 3rd element--hue.  Three things have to balance to really make it sing.  Because we see in color we sometime misjudge an image based on how beautiful the colors are and not see the rest of the elements and how they balance themselves out. 


Regards
Gary

[Gare]

Not only is there color, but there's different types of color film--I used to detest Fuji because its skin color temperature was balanced for Asians and not Caucasians, which is fair enough. Similarly, Kodachrome was and is wildly inaccurate, but the human eye is instinctively attracted to saturated colors (it's no coincidence that candy packaging is largely fluorescent!), in the same way sRGB is being used as a scanner and inkjet color profile these days. Thanks piles, Microsoft, for having invented sRGB 

Photoshop users can warm up bad digitized color pictures using Photo Filters under the Adjust submenu--it really works well. But ultimately, a crappy color photo is due to poor composition and color doesn't mask a bum photo, IMFFHO.

My Best,

Gare