Black and White
A selection of my black and white images.
We spent ages trudging through the heather on Eyam Moor trying to find this stone circle, in the end we found it by accident just after we’d given up. The sun, which had popped out from behind the clouds a few times during the afternoon, made a brief appearance to light up the heather.
I should perhaps have taken some shots of the stones, but I got distracted by the light on this piece of grass.
This shot is was taken one lunch time in Autumn. I’d gone out a few days earlier in search of rich autumnal colours but I didn’t really see anything that I liked. When I found this scene I was intrigued by the light more than the colours and knew it could look really striking in black and white.
Unfortunately it was windy and the end result had some movement in, so I made a note to come back again when conditions were better.
This retaken effort was processed in exactly the same way as the original but fortunately none of the leaves are blurred 
This image was taken during a short break in North Wales. The main purpose of the visit was for a family walk to the summit of Snowdon (and of course for me to take plenty of photos) but unfortunately the weather was too poor for either. In the end this was the only image I really liked from the trip, which was taken on the only really sunny day of the week, before the rest of the group arrived.
A Hoya circular polariser was used here to darken the sky and improve the contrast in the rest of the shot.
Technical info : Sigma 18-200 lens at 18mm, 1/160s (because it was windy and I didn’t want the grass to blur), f8.0, ISO100
Not the only shot from this location on my blog, but my favourite of the two here (and of the 10 or so I took) - taken just a few minutes after the previous one.
I’ve always loved this location, and have visited here with many friends over the years. There is nothing utterly fantastic about it but it’s a nice place to be with friends on a warm summer afternoon (or in this instance, totally alone on a warm summer evening)
There was once a small car park and a picnic area here but it has fallen into disrepair since the gate was permanently locked due to vandalism. The car park is now overgrown, in fact I was standing where it used to be when I took this shot, and I suspect dog walkers are now the only visitors rather than picnicking families.
Another old image that I was never entirely happy with. This was taken on chilly morning excursion out at Beacon Hill with Dan and was one of the few shots I got - the rest being spoilt by the lens misting up all the time.
Whilst I liked the original image at the time I thought the contrast could have been better.
For this newer version I went back to the original shots (3 exposures, each 2 stops apart) and reprocessed them in Photomatix. This resulting image was then desaturated and had contrast adjustments.
A trial version of HDRsoft’s Photomatix is available at http://www.hdrsoft.com/download.html. Should you decide to buy a copy of Photomatix, feel free to use my discount code, “AndyStafford15″ which will give you 15% off.
After six months of having a camera I decided it was about time I went through my previous shots and tidied them up, both in terms of organisation and correcting past mistakes. A couple of people commented on this image recently - I was really happy with it at the time but my preferences and skill have changed somewhat since taking it so it became the first one to have a bit of a facelift.
At the time it was taken I was interested in the effect it was possible to create with running water and Photomatix, and even though the shot was taken during the day I still managed to get managed to get a 2.5s exposure by choosing a shaded location and a small aperture.
The three bracketed shots (at 0.6s, 1/6s and 2.5s) were then combined in Photomatix and the resulting image was desaturated and had some contrast tweaks to enhance the molten glass look.
Posted in b&w, hdr, long exposures.
It seems I’m currently “very into” black and white photography - although to be fair, it’s something that I’ve always liked when other people have done it but never really bothered with it myself.
With the advent of digital photography I think B&W has got a bit of a bad name for itself - tools which can greyscale an image mean that it’s an easy way to attempt to salvage a flawed colour image (not that I don’t convert my own colour images sometimes also). The shot above however was achieved using a Cokin P003 red filter, with the image then being desaturated and the contrast tweaked slightly - which took about 30 seconds at most - the ideal amount of processing time when you’ve got a lot of photos to work through
Why desaturate? Why not just shoot in black and white mode on the camera? Well, if I was shooting in jpeg mode it might be a good idea but as I’m shooting in raw mode, when I get the images into Lightroom they will be red again anyway so there seems little point. It doesn’t really help for reviewing the shots on the camera either as the black and white preview displayed on the camera seem quite different to what I see in Lightroom. Besides, I’ve got used to previewing the red images now - once you’ve learned to trust your manual exposures it’s not that much of a problem.
Using an external filter isn’t without its problems though - the main drawback with the red being that you lose 3 stops worth of light so you end up having to make sacrifices in either ISO, shutter speed or aperture (or a combination of the three). Shooting at ISO100, f/11, 1/250s isn’t going to be an option unless you are taking a picture on the surface of the sun so I usually end up at ISO200, f/8, 1/100s - not ideal, but as an exercise in learning to take control of your camera in its manual mode I can heartily recommend it.
Fortunately many DSLRs now have the ability to simulate the affect of certain colour filters built in to their Monochrome picture options - certainly the Canon range do. These can be used without any loss of light, but only have an effect if shooting in JPG - raw images remain unaffected by them.
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