Wise man once said, “When you want to shoot in black-and-white, buy black-and-white film.”
Okay, so the wise man was me.
Okay, so I didn’t buy the black-and-white film; Kingsley gave me an expired roll of 24-frame Kodak T-Max Pro ISO 400 for my birthday.
In any other case, I usually shoot in color, and then use the Hue/Saturation/Lightness tool in Photoshop if I want to change it to black-and-white, as it gives me 6 different channels of color to make black-and-white from. Picking black-and-white on your digicam or digital SLR is simply not the same.
Location: Jeff’s shop at Ampang Park, featuring me showing Jeff my Sony A100. I think this was the Vivitar 24mm F2.0 lens on my Olympus OM-2000. Asyraf shot this. This is the shop where I usually get my film processed and scanned straight to CD for RM10 a roll.
Honestly, I didn’t find the dynamic range of black-and-white negatives that amazing. The grain was also so much stronger than equivalent color negatives (but immediately removeable with Photoshop’s Despeckle filter, which is so much more effective on film grain than digital noise.)
And so, I used a 52mm UV filter superglued to a 55mm UV filter to attach my Hoya 25A red filter to my Vivitar 24mm F2.0 lens. There was awesome vignetting because it was a wide angle lens, which less allowance for smaller filters. The red filter reduces light coming through, around 1-2 stops. In this case it also increased the exposure for the trees, in an almost infrared-like way.
However, putting the red filter was so much better than without! Red filters increase contrast and darken blue skies. Also, with a red filter, you really feel like you’re seeing in black-and-white.
Bukit Jalil stadium, from the LRT station.
That is all. Black-and-white, used in the correct situations, will look great. Also, it is much more possible to do your own black-and-white film processing than with color. More on that later.
In other news, Syaz won 2007’s first Guess That Trashcan instalment, guessing Subang Parade’s new carpeted floor as the location of the trashcan. I can’t pimp him/her because I don’t know him/her and don’t have a URL to work with. 😛
Hey, I shot the first photo
And I didn’t mean to get the credit lah, just amused that I got the shot right.
Argh, need lotsa dodging.
Haha, I always credit you. I wasn’t sure if it was Kingsley or you. Oh you mean B&W should be dodged? I was thinking I’d have so much range that I shouldn’t be doing darkroom stuff.
Though, without dodging the first picture you could imagine a bright lightbulb, which I guess is cool.