Choosing B/W
Well, today I was looking to get a specific photo and spent a few minutes setting up the scene. I took around 15-20 pictures with some small variations in the composition, lighting etc. Well, then I loaded them onto the Computer and started looking to see if I got what I set out to.
Well, I can say that I was not really very happy with any of them and to get something useful I would have to pull a rabbit out of my hat.
I always shoot in RAW when shooting with my DSLR, and if I had been shooting in jpg today, I would have deleted the lot of them and tried again another day.
What I was trying to shoot was the large gear ring of my push bike. So, I set the bike up in the Carport, and got out my white linen backdrop. The backdrop was set up about 60cm behind the bike, and I got down and real close (about 20cm) away from the main chainrings.
What I was hoping to do was to have the white background over-exposed, and the chain, derailer and chainring as the subject. I wanted the background to be white to totally seperate and isolate the subject. I even tried putting a remote flash behind the white sheet and lighting up the other side of it.
In the end, I did select 1 photo tha I was happy with the composition of, but everything else really sucked! I spent a bit of time making some adjustments to the RAW image, but just couldn't get it to look right.
Well, you can see the image, but I somehow managed to get a little bit of red from the box I was leaning the bike against into the picture. The background was not totally white like I wanted. I tried a few things like cropping it to remove the red, adjusting the shadows and highlights, adjusting the white balance etc. I tried a lot of things and actually got an image that I was pretty happy with.
But before I processed it into a jpg file, I decided to try it as a B/W Conversion. I simply dropped the saturation right down, and was stunned at the transformation of the picture. I suddenly had exactly what I had been trying to acheive - a strong image that was seperated from the background.
I spent a little bit more time making some small adjustments to the photo so I could see all the details I wanted and finally came up with this.....
In the end, I didn't need to crop anything at all, I just needed to consider that the picture might make a great B/W shot. The reason I didn't really consider it first up is simple - I rarely do a B/W conversion and nearly always want a colour photo. To me, by simply doing the Conversion I turned a so-so photo into a very simple, strong image that I am really happy with.
Technical Info - 25mm Focal Lenght (50mm film equiv) ISO 100, 1/40sec at F/4.
Reasons: There was plenty of light so I stuck with 100ISO. 25mm gave me the image I was looking for and F/4 gave me a shallow DOF letting me keep the chain in focus and not much else.
Once again, lesson learnt - consider everything before giving up on a photo.
