Five Day B&W Challenge: Day 5

"Momentito"

During a four-day vacation in Mexico, I captured this photo of two people hugging at the side of the street. I loved the juxtaposition of the bus's motion in the background with the stillness of their embrace.

From a conversion perspective, this image was pretty straightforward. The challenge was more of a personal struggle — I love the streaks of red on the pair's clothes, but I think it still works out pretty well in black and white. I tried to crop it in a way that would reduce the amount of distraction without eliminating context. I didn't want to focus so much on them that you lose track of their surroundings, or that you lose the feeling of the street moving around them.

Five Day B&W Challenge: Day 4

Earlier this year, I visited some friends in New York City, and we took some time to visit the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The Memorial consists primarily of two square-shaped waterfalls, which are somewhat distinct in that they are so large, but so easy to interact with. The walls of water are dozens of feet tall, and hundreds of feet wide, but the water originates in a mirror pool that you can swirl with your fingertips before it pours over the edge, and your influence can alter the continuously-changing pattern that the water makes as it falls.

The names in the memorial are inscribed in bronze panels and mounted where people can touch them. Feel them. Mull them over and ponder them. I noticed that a lot of visitors would stand at the edge, pause with a hand on the stone, and just look out over the water.

For the B&W conversion, the main challenge here was that the man's shirt is overexposed in the blue channel. After a couple different attempts to bring his shirt down without adversely affecting the rest of the image, I decided to just crop him mostly out. The final image shows him, and shows his contact with the child, but focuses on the child and the child's experience of the memorial.

Five Day B&W Challenge: Day 3

For day three, I decided to dig into my mostly-neglected set of images from the NASCAR Toyota/Save Mart 350, held at Sonoma Raceway back in June of this year. As far as conversions go, this time was all about controlling the viewer's visual attention — getting them to notice certain things, and to pay less or no attention to other things. Many of the the NASCAR teams feature incredibly bright, saturated colors which are designed to attract attention, and the grayscale conversion allowed me to work against that dynamic.

My treatment of this first image was mainly to diffuse the viewer's attention. In the original, the bright colors draw your attention to the crew member's uniform, and from there, to his face, to his hands, to the air hose on his gun, and to the fire extinguisher inside. As your eyes take in the image, it ends up being difficult for them to focus on other aspects of the scene — the tires and other pit-stop paraphernalia surrounding the main subject; the details of the mock hub mounted to the trailer; even the actual expression of concentration on his face that reinforces the dynamic pose of his body.

By contrast, the treatment of the second image was to make the distribution of viewer attention more focused. The bright colors everywhere cause the viewer's eye to bounce around the scene. Whereas in the monochrome version, all of the colors are relatively similar shades of gray, and the strong contrast of the brake components draws the viewer's eye into the wheel well.

This one didn't really work out; but not all experiments turn out how you hope they will. I wanted to focus attention on the different crew-member acts — hands poised to give the car a push start out of the pits; gas can chugging away; new windshield tearoff whipping in the wind; and something with the front-left wheel.

But it's all pretty muddled. The windshield tearoff pretty much disappears when I try to set the curves/contrast for the rest of the scene, and if I set things for the tearoff, the rest of the scene ends up with way too much contrast. The comromise that I'm publishing is really just the worst of both worlds. Oh well. Still more to learn :o)

Five Day B&W Challenge: Day 2

There were a bunch of options here that all looked reasonable, but in the spirit of pushing outside of my comfort zone, I decided to focus on nuance and subtlety. One of the things I learned (which I already had some idea of) is that my main editing monitor has very poor grayscale rendition at very low luminance levels. The really low blacks tend to go away completely, and the levels that it does display tend to have color casts. By comparison, when I look at the same image on my second monitor, the color rendition is completely neutral.

Even so, I tried to use a light touch with the Tone Curve module to bring out a little bit of shadow detail on the near side of L's face. It's hard to tell if it worked or if it didn't — one one monitor, you can _barely_ see the slightest hint of her large, shiny earring. On my other monitor, I can see the faint hint of the outline of her ear and her haircut, and you can see that she's wearing a pair of earrings. That's about what I was going for, so I'm going to call that a tentative success.

I also used the Monochrome module in an attempt to massage her phone reflection into the other reflections in the bowl. It's still there, but it doesn't draw your attention the same way that it does in the original.

Finally, I tried a bunch of things to pull down the translucent highlight from the edge of her thumb on the bowl, but I didn't find anything that worked. The main challenge was that I _really_ like the stark contrast of her backlit hair, and the levels in the hair are pretty similar to the levels on her thumb. Clearly something I need to keep in mind while shooting.