diptych # 187-89 (trees) / kitchen sink # 31 ~ some thoughts on B&W
Friday, November 20, 2015 at 11:02AM 
kitchen sink / dirty water ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggen
birch ~ somewhere in Connecticut / near Swastika, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggen
birch ~ Battery Park - Manhattan, NYC / Au Sable River near Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggen
trees ~ Lake Champlain shoreline/ Peru, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggen
As I have been making tree diptychs, which, BTW, are NOT my intended end product, it occurred to me after snooping around on the interweb that, when a tree is the primary visual referent in a picture, a B&W conversion is an interesting option.
I come to that conclusion because the overwhelming majority of trees, trunk wise, have no real color and what color they do have is primarily monochromatic. In addition, tree trunks usually exhibit a high degree of texture. Consequently, the combination of the monochromatic and textural characteristics of tree trunks is a fine referent for a B&W approach to picturing them. But, here's the caveat ....
.... not any old conversion from color to B&W will do.
Inasmuch as I have had a fair amount of experience, back in the good ol' days of B&W film, with using Wratten filters - green red, yellow, blue - to accentuate / de-accentuate the B&W tonal values of colors found in a scene, I am having a fair amount of success using the Image > Adjustments > Black and White color specific sliders tool in Photoshop. And Holy Digital Darkroom, Batman, the color based sliders are essentially infinitely adjustable Wratten filters.
And like so many advantages found in the digital darkroom, I can create a number of different conversion picture files using different color sliders and then blend the results into one final conversion file. That allows me to adjust the tonal values of multiple colors, something that was not possible in the analog film / wet darkroom days.
The net result of this type of B&W conversion can far exceed anything that was possible in the the good ol' days. I suspect Sir Ansel might have thought he had died and gone to heaven - he's most certainly dead but I have no idea were he might be other than in a box in the cold, cold ground - with the amount of control (Zone System on steroids) that he could have had in the B&W digital darkroom.
Reader Comments (1)
Dear "Old Ansel" as you refer to him....was a pianist. His love of music informed two aspects of his work...technically..to equate the gray scale to the octave,,,and image wise to make his images correspondingly symphonic.