An important message.
An important message via Bianca Dopson about being careful who you get to do photos of your bub.
Going black and white
Sunday, March 27, 2011 Posted by Bart
As an experiment and for something different to do I'm going to limit how I can take personal photographs for the next week. The simple rules I have set myself are:
1 - photos must be in monochrome.
2 - the lens used must be a prime lens
This does a couple of things intend to force a different way of thinking when taking images. Firstly, with monochrome you have to consider what colours are going to look like when converted to greyscale. This can change with the addition of filters so that, for example, a blue sky can be rendered black with the use of a red filter. Shooting on a digital camera has the advantage of inbuilt red, green and blue filters that exist as part of the bayer array on the cameras sensor. The camera can be told to ignore one or more colour channels and the result is the same as using a filter on the lens. In order to force this rule I am also shooting JPEG instead of raw. The reason is that when shooting in raw you are keeping all the information about the image, including colour information. The purpose of this exercise is to not be tempted to go back to the colour image. The camera will bake the image into a black and white JPEG and that's all I'll have. The added advantage is that a 4gb card now holds a gazillion photos.
Secondly, by using a prime lens (one that doesn't zoom) I have to think more about positioning myself in relation to the subject. I can't just zoom out to fit more in or zoom in to see detail. I need to "zoom with my feet" so to speak. Fortunately this rule is easy as I only have one prime lens and that is my trusty 50mm.
I haven't set any rules oth than this so I can still control iso, aperture, shutter speed as well as adjust the settings the camera will use to create the black and white image. There are all pre-shutter adjustments though so I still have to think about what I'm doing before I do it.
The aim of all this is to keep active those parts of my brain that influence how I take images. The end result is to better myself, become a better photographer and not be reliant on camera defaults or image editing software for great images.
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