black and white photography

lens-artists: exploring color – b&w

This week Patti invites photographers to explore a couple of questions in regards to black and white vs color images: 1) When is it best to use one vs the other? 2) What’s the benefit of each one?

First I have to admit that even though I have read various articles about what types of photographs are ideal for black and white, I generally move in and out of an experimental flow of emotional responses.

For example the first image was edited in Capture One from a raw file to a jpg. The black and white image was edited in Silver Efex Pro2. The last was edited in Color Efex Pro 4 which, for me, invokes a stimulus response of soft and gentle.

As I’ve been experiencing difficulties using Photoshop and Capture One due to upgrades, I made the very difficult decision to cancel both subscriptions. Anyone have any recommendations for editing programs that will work with an ISO 13.7.3?

Thank you for visiting.

life passages … 99

Is my mind elsewhere

Or has it simply not sung?

Hototogisu*

~Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693)**

*Hototogisu, translated as cuckoo, wood thrush and sometimes nightingale.

The bird’s song is a strong but mournful cry.

It is said to die after singing 8,008 times.

It is also known as the “bird of time,”

“messenger of death” and “bird of disappointed love,”

and flies back and forth from this world to the next.

Confucian axiom: If one’s mind is elsewhere, one will look but not see, listen but not hear

**cited in:

The Classic Tradition of Haiku

Edited by:  Faubion Bowers

life’s passages … 68

winterwalk

Nikon D750… f/1.8 1/800s 35mm 200 ISO

“FRIDAY MORNING, 9 O’CLOCK. People complain about how dark it is in the mornings. But this is often the best time of my day, when the dawn peers grey and silent into my pale windows. Then my bright little table lamp becomes a blazing spotlight and floods over the big black shadow of my desk. … This morning I am wonderfully peaceful. Just like a storm that spent itself. I have noticed that this always happens following days of intense inner striving after clarity, birth pangs with sentences and thoughts that refuse to be born and make tremendous demands on you. Then suddenly it drops away, all of it, and a benevolent tiredness enters the brain, then everything feels calm again …”

cited: Trans: Arno Pomerans, An Interrupted Life The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, pg 69.

life’s passages … 22

sunday morning with Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

“… She was staring into the lake, watching the snow as it reached the black water and then vanished. As if the snow never existed. How nature teaches the same thing again and again, she thought. Yet it was so beautiful, the silence, the drift of the snow down from the heavens, the disappearance of each flake as it touched the surface of the lake. Surely they live on, she thought.” ~The Snow Fox, pg. 94

words of wisdom

“… the wind bids me to leave you.

“Less hasty am I than the wind, yet I must go.

“We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us.

“Even while the earth sleeps we travel.

” We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.”~Kahlil Gibran*

Paula’s Lost in Translation: Words of Wisdom

*cited: Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet. (Alfred A Knopf 1973)