On Deciding . . . Better 3.0

After assessing a solid year’s work of building a portfolio, I decided that I was evolving two bodies of work: a color series documenting the Suburban Landscape and a black and white series documenting my urban travel. It was clear that some photography didn’t fit, as it was to document family or vacation.

When I brought the D300 on my long business trip I knew that I was inviting crossover images by switching tools. When the Leica M6 with C41 process black and white film came on a trip, I had no option for doing color studies. But since I’ve been so happy with the utility of the Nikon D300, I brought it and just the 24mm and 50mm lenses, as if I had the minimal Leica kit.

When I shot this image, I recall thinking “red scooter, red trashbag”. I was creating a color study, something I would not have done with the usual travel setup. It turned out to be a striking image, fitting in more with the light and color aspects of the Suburban Landscape project.

I’ll call it a travel photo in the style of my Suburban Studies and continue to create monochrome conversions from the bulk of the urban images where form, not color, is dominant.

I had been in Europe for almost a week before I saw my first sunny day.

FInally, with the release of Aperture 2.0, I can catalog and scan the D300 images easily. So far the new release seems stable and reasonably more capable. There are a few raw decoding glitches, but mostly the D300 images are appropriately rendered.

However my experience with Capture NX and the in camera settings of the D300 will probably reduce my use of Aperture post processing. In a scenic landscape like this, I can very quickly create an image with some snap. But the saturation and D-Lighting effects that I get with Capture NX in combination with the local control of the Efex filters within Photoshop will generally limit Aperture to cataloging and quick conversions- like this one.

Another image from Amsterdam. Again with the D300 and 24mm f/2.8. As I expected, the combination was not really much heavier or bulkier than the Leica with the 35mm Summicron, providing the same field of view, but a stop slower. With ISO 800 on the D300 being cleaner than the ISO 400 (or ISO 320) film in the Leica, speed is no different between the two systems.

By continuing to convert to Black and White by policy for these travel images, I have greater control of rendering by converting to black and white in Photoshop. So the Leica has lost it’s prime role as a travel camera to the D300 on the basis of image quality.

This is a more thoroughly processed image. I started with a conversion in Capture NX, trying to capture the most information in the color image. Then in Photoshop I created the independent conversion layers that Vincent Versace describes in “Welcome to Oz”. My intent was mostly to create a well graded and fully toned black and white image. The rest of the PS work was to bring out the light that was in the scene, using some selective sharpening using Nik’s program.

All in all it’s a less casual, more controlled approach than shooting with the Leica and a C41 process BW film like Kodak CN400BW.

I’m back from my very extended travel. Berlin, Amsterdam, Milan. The D300 was a perfect companion and I returned with about 750 images captured.

In Amsterdam, I played a bit with capturing the Dutch on their bicycles by using a slow shutter speed, here about 1/20th second. While my intent going in was to keep the city travel portfolio as black and white, seeing images in color makes it a bit more difficult to stick to an arbitrary convention. I converted and processed this one quickly just to get an image up tonight. I’ll be working through the images over a few weeks, trying to get at least one per day online.

More extended business travel here. It’s overcast, intermittantly rainy and a bit raw here in Berlin. In a break from my ongoing business travel project with the Leica and BW film, I brought the D300 with me instead. Since I’ve been watching the PMA announcements with the thought of adding a compact camera for travel, I tried the iPhone camera for a quick capture this morning. It’s a view of the sunrise through a hotel window, 8th floor. No editing.

I hadn’t captured an image in about a week, so I was desperate to grab something today. Just captured 20 images, nothing really worked out. This was grabbed from the car window at the stoplight at 7 Mile Lane and Smith Avenue. It’s much too cluttered, but I did my best to pull down the tone on everything but the white house and tree shadows.

I’ve been working on the black and white conversions some more, trying to understand how to mix color channels to alter the tonal balance in an image. It’s complex and I don’t feel I have all of the tools, but I’ve made some headway.

Time and time again I get to a certain point in post processing an image and I stare at the screen, blank as to what to do next. I’ll give up and upload the image to Flickr. Once I see the thumbnail, it becomes clear to me what the image needs to get to the next level. In this image, the wall at the left and the sidewalk had the same value. It became clear that the wall needed to be brought down and the sidewalk up in value.

I also used John Paul Capinigro’s colorization method on this image, using hue and saturation in PS CS3. It’s easier than the duo or tritone methods I’ve tried before and I think is a bit richer.

I took a short trip to the Boston area on business this past week, dragged the Lecia along and took no images. I’ll start some more extensive travel soon. Should I try the D80 or D300, shoot for black and white and use conversion? Or bring the Leica as usual?

This is an interesting image for me as it ended up exactly 180 degrees from where it started. In the original image, the tree trunk in the front was the darkest, the trunk in the back was lighter and the background yet lighter.

I realized that for it to work, the front tree would have to be the most well lit, so I worked to push the light to the front and allow the rest of the scene to recede. I also for the first time used the Nik Pro Sharpener demo to bring out detail in the trunk on the front.