Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Black and White Wednesday - Experimenting with B&W

the long road

Black and White Wednesday is run by Lisa over at
The Long Road to China.



I did a black and white experiment while I was at Mount Tom State Park in Litchfield, CT. I've been struggling to take photos that look just as good black and white as they do in color. So I played with the manual settings on my point and shoot in order to shoot in "classic color," aka black and white. The photo above is, as it says, straight out of the camera. (All I did was resize for web and put the text on.) The photo below was in color, and I converted it, as well as adjusting the levels and contrast as I usually do.



I'm on the fence about the results. The contrast of the SOOC shot is so low, but there are more details and textures that seemed to fade in the black and white conversion. On the other hand, my experiment is flawed because I did do levels adjustment. I should be comparing the SOOC shot to a converted photo WITHOUT any other processing.



Which one do you like better?
What are your thoughts on my failed experiment?

6 comments:

Melis said...

Hm, interesting. What if you had also adjusted contrast on the SOOC B&W? And what if you had just converted the color SOOC without changing the levels? I've always been curious about how the shot-in-bw photo would compare to the just plain converted photo. Crazy.

Ashley Sisk said...

I love that second shot! Much more contrasty!

Izzy said...

They both look great, I don't think it was a "fail" :)

Julie said...

I think I like the second one best!!

Mama Hen said...

Hey Amy, I love Litchfield in the Fall! I was going to say the second picture and then I looked at them again and like the first one better. They are both beautiful! Have a great night!

Mama Hen

Erika B said...

Beautiful post proecessing. Beautiful shot over all.

Erika B