It’s been a while since we had real snow in Hamburg, but during the last 4-5 days the entire landscape has been looking like a fairy tale. So it was more than fitting to go out with the camera and take a few images. Here is one that I like a lot, taken in Stadtpark, then converted to black-and-white, with a hint of split toning.
PS: Merry Christmas to everyone and a Happy New Year!
I’ve been photographing seriously for about 13 years now and until March of 2008 I would have said that I’m absolutely not a person photographer. I used to take extra care to avoid people in my photographs or I edited them out in Photoshop.
So when I visited India in March of 2008, I’d planned to photograph Taj Mahal, the spices and the colors, but not the people. But — surprise, surprise — when I came back, 80% of my photos were of people, many of those portraits. And then — surprise again — just as an experiment I turned the portraits into black-and-white, and they looked even stronger. This wasn’t planned, it just happened — the people begged to be photographed and the images begged to be shown in monochrome.
Nothing has been quite the same since. Although I still haven’t gone as far as asking strangers if I can take their picture or asking friends or models to pose for me, I’ve started to allow people to wonder into my photographs and I’ve shot a few abstracts with people in them.
I’ve also been looking at lots of photo books lately, and these surely have an effect on me. How could it be otherwise, with such strong images by Steve McCurry, Sebastião Salgado, Herb Ritts, Robert Mapplethorpe, Isabel Muñoz, etc.?
Finding time for photography during the last 3-4 months has been tough. I’ve been trying to compensate by forcing myself to go out even for short periods of time, but I feel rushed and nothing really good comes out. And it takes much longer to “get in the zone.” Also since the time is limited, I prefer to visit places that I’m already familiar with, that’s why some themes keep popping up.
Anyhow, here are three images from my last trip to Hamburg’s HafenCity. I don’t find them too bad, but no great art either…
I’ve been so incredibly busy lately, I haven’t taken almost any images in three months! My hands are itching and I have several ideas, but either the weather does not cooperate or I have boring stuff to take care of.
And I haven’t looked at many photo books lately either. Right now I have a stack of “unread” books on the side of my bed that weighs almost as much as I do. Here a few titles:
Oh, and talking about books… I fear I’m turning into a collector of photography books. I used to have a few how-to books only, but the number of fine-art books has grown steadily over the past few months and the black and white ones are winning by a thin margin over color.
Dizzy Gillespie, Copyright by Herb Ritts
Djimon with Octopus, Copyright by Herb Ritts
I’ve received a few questions about what “tricks” I’m using for my black-and-white images. Well, I’d say that I don’t use any tricks, just the tools of the trade. Let me show you…
Here is a typical image straight out of the camera. It’s quite good already — it shows an interesting face with a very intense gaze, it’s sharp and well exposed.
But naturally there is room for improvement. In Camera Raw I cropped to a 3:4 ratio, increased the exposure some, darkened slightly and increased the contrast a good bit.
Now the face is much more dominant, and the eyes, mustache and beard are more vibrant. I could leave the image in color, but it begs to be converted to black and white. But before doing that, I inspected the whole area at 200% magnification and removed any dust, skin blemishes, etc. That small triangle of background in the upper-left corner bothered me too, so I filled it with pixels from the turban.
The next step was to look at the three individual channels. I liked the green one much more than red or blue one, so after experimenting some, I settled on -20, +170, -50.
There — the clash of the skin and turban colors is gone, but the image lacks contrast. I added a contrast layer and it did wonders to the face, but made the turban too bright. I counteracted that by adding a mask and limiting the contrast increase to the face only.
Now the eyes, forehead and especially the right quarter of the face became too dark, so I added a lightening layer and a mask that revealed the effect only in the desired areas.
The right eye is still too dark, which I corrected with a lightening layer.
The most noticeable problems have been addressed now, but the turban, the mustache and the background in the lower-right corner are still too bright. I counteracted that with a darkening layer.
Now, that’s already very good! In fact, this is the first version that I printed and showed around. I even glued it on my wall and stared at it for a few days. After getting over my initial excitement, I started noticing further possibilities for improvement.
First I darkened the brightest areas of the turban, shirt and collar as they were drawing attention away from the face.
Then I darkened the edges and corners of the image a good bit.
The light area of the background on the left-hand side and by the much brighter background on the right-hand side bothered me immediately, so made them very dark, almost without any detail.
And that’s where I am right now. Admittedly the last three changes were quite subtle, but in my mind, they are the ones that make the image really “sing.”
I’ve been staring at the version above for a while now and I can’t think of any further improvements. I’ll look at it again tomorrow, and if then too I don’t see anything that bothers me, I’ll make a second print.
That print might reveal further problems and lead to even more adjustment layers, but for now I’m satisfied.
By the way, here is what my layer stack looks like right now:
UPDATE: It is now one day later. This morning I didn’t see any problems on screen, so I made a 10×15 cm print on cheap glossy paper. When it came out, I immediately saw three areas that just had to be improved. I lightened the white collar on the right-hand side, then lightened the whole image a tiny bit. Finally I spotted the very dark area in the middle of the chin, which, although perfectly natural, was too obvious and distracting.
I’m making another small print right now, and if that one holds for a day, it will be time for an A4-size print on pearl paper.
I must be in the mood for making portfolios, because I’ve finished another one containing eight black and white portraits. They all happen to be of people who I photographed in India, and that’s probably because people in “more developed countries” do not age so interestingly.
I was on a business trip in Ludwigshafen and Mannheim this week, and I noticed a poster for a an exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s early work in the Kunsthalle Mannheim. I was leaving today, so I canceled my last meeting and went to see the exhibit instead. 
It is dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the birth of Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 — 2004), and it shows 79 prints from the early 1930′s. Wow, talk about getting back to the roots of photography — one camera, one lens, black-and-white film and absolutely no cropping of the negatives! What a contrast to today’s fancy bodies, fast zoom lenses and super pumped-up colors in Photoshop… (Which of course is symptomatic of weak images needing a digital trick in order to grab attention.)
If you have some interest in photography, you’ve probably already seen some of the images that I saw today, but I saw original prints with size 30 x 45 cm and not the usual small reproductions in books or on the Internet. Of course not all images were equally strong (my favorites are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7), but HCB was indeed a master of composition and already at the age of 24 had a great feel for “the decisive moment.”
But he accomplished yet another feat — what he saw in the viewfinder was the final image — his prints always show 100% of the negative. To me this sounds utterly incredible, as I always shoot with some extra space around the desired image and I crop my images to many different aspect ratios, whatever fits the subject best.
Anyhow, the exhibit is very inspiring and definitely worth seeing. If you are in the area any time until June 8, go for it!
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos
PS: It was this image that inspired HCB to take his camera and go out in the streets.
PPS: Maybe HCB had two lenses. A small number of images (for example, the one above) appear to have been taken with a wide-angle lens.
I am still on a quest to improve my black-and-white photographs, and I am still looking at various books. I’ve already reviewed two books (review 1 and review 2) which were not quite what I was looking for, but Michael Freeman’s Mastering Black and White Digital Photography is quite good.
The book delivers exactly what the title promises — clear and practical advice about how to create good black and white photographs using digital methods. It is divided into 5 chapters.
Chapter one, The language of Mono, is supposed to be an introduction: why do we make black and white photographs, what makes a good black and white photograph, what to watch out for when making black and white images. In other words it’s more artistic than technical, but with 16 pages only it’s too short to cover the topics in any depth at all. In fact, the book would probably be better off without this chapter. Or how about showing 16 gorgeous black and white images without accompanying them by superficial comments?
Chapter two, Color into Grayscale, covers just about everything you need to know about converting a color image into black and white. On 50 pages it discusses the channel mixer in great detail and shows you how to “place” any color anywhere on the brightness scale. Several pages are dedicated to achieving realistic skin tones of dark, light and Asian skin.
Having attained a black and white image with optimal relationships between the gray tones in chapter two, chapter three, Digital Black and White, shows you how to optimize the appearance of such an image: maximizing the dynamic range, retaining shadow detail, preventing blown highlights, various methods of adjusting the tonal distribution, dodging and burning using layers and layer masks. There is also a discussion about noise, upscaling, scanning negatives and positives. All in all, quite interesting 40 pages.
On the next 28 pages chapter four, Image Editing and Effects, discusses further important topics: conveying a specific mood, image toning, duotones and tritones and some less important ones: bas relief, solarization, posterization, hand coloring.
The last chapter, The Print, is once again too short to have any depth or value. On 10 pages the author touches on the topics of desktop printers, creating contact sheets, printer calibration, ink and paper and mounting and framing an image. Not only is the information here utterly short, it is also dated. The printers discussed are the budget Canon Selphy and Pixma without a word on the higher quality ink jets like the Epson 3800. Instead of talking about third-party monochrome ink-sets, Michael Freeman should have better discussed the now-standard black-and-white modes of the printer drivers and their ability to produce stunning black and white images with the standard ink sets.
So what’s the final verdict? I’d say that the book is definitely worth reading and the information presented in chapters 2, 3 and 4 more than makes up for the weak chapters 1 and 5. Simply concentrate on pages 26 — 144.
And now a question. Are there any even better books out there? Something more artistic maybe? I feel like I now have a grasp of the technical side of black-and-white, but I need a ideas on further increasing the impact of my images.
What’s wrong with me?!?! I went to India, came back with 1187 images, and the first ones that I’m showing here are in black and white?!?! From the country that people go to to experience color ?!?!
The first thing that I did to my images was to group them according to their location (so I could apply metadata easily). But in any one location I took images of people, animals, buildings, temples, etc. and it just seemed right to group the people together, animals together and so on. So now I have directories according to the image content, and the first directory that I started organizing and editing was “portraits.” I started with about 100 images and after some light image editing, sorting and rating, I’m down to 62 images that I’ll probably end up keeping. Of those, the faces of the older people seemed the most expressive, and — you got it — older faces lend themselves very well to black and white.
So here are my four black-and-white portrait picks from the 2008 India images.
I’ve slowly gotten tired of the two current prints in my office, so yesterday I made three new ones and framed them (30 x 40 cm prints in 50 x 60 cm frames). On Monday I’ll hang the new ones in my office and the old ones at home.
This is my first printed three-of-a-kind series, so I’m quite excited.
I have an even stronger third image, but it doesn’t lend itself well to a 3:4 aspect ratio, so I had to go with this one. Since I use standard frames and mattes, I have to produce standard-sized prints… Or I need to start cutting my own mattes.
Technical and creative workshops, fototrips to exciting locations worldwide, fotografic consulting and a free monthly meeting in Hamburg, Germany. All services available in English and German.
