30 Mar 11. As I've written many times prior, I grew up next door to a B&W darkroom, my bedroom door about 10 feet, if that, from the door to the darkroom. We both shared the quiet and solitude of the basement, and to this day I still feel that a house sans basement isn't a whole house. Many were the hours I shared with my father in that small, crowded (for two of us), dark, room, and to this day the smell of fixer brings back those memories. Apparently I'm not the only one who has these memories as the next version of Adobe's Lightroom will be renamed Photoshop CS6 and dedicated to just photographers. Photoshop, as we presently know it now, will be called Adobe ImageReady, and dedicated to graphics designers of all kinds. Upstart new manager at Adobe, April Fulson Yu, has stated: "We discovered that photographers long for the days of real photography with film and smelly chemicals so we wanted to reinforce that memory. We can't actually make the new Photoshop smell, but we're doing what we can to make photographers feel at home." Well now, if we are really going to bring back all that nostalgia, perhaps a big push will have to be in the arena of B&W photography. So to get a jump start on this new approach, here is a shot from the Fisherman's Terminal workshop in B&W. I started with three images, converted those to HDR as a mid point, and then the HDR to B&W. The seagull in the image flew to the mast top and just sat there for over 30 minutes while we snapped away. ISO 200; 2.5 sec @ f / 10 on a tripod.
31 Mar 11 Well. I must admit, I didn't know there was such a liking for B&W images with the group. Perhaps we need to resurrect Ansel. In any event, after reading all the comments, I'm sharing another B&W image for today, but this time I've come at it from a more standard approach and limited my work to a single image. In the process, it is becoming very obvious, at least to me, that B&W HDR is an area that has tremendous possibility and overlooked by just about every expert out there. I spent over 30 minutes working on this image as opposed to perhaps 5 minutes on the one for yesterday. To my eye the image shared yesterday has far greater detail and a much fuller complement of all the tones in Ansel's zone system than does the one for today. After working up this shot I did another in HDR and am pretty much convinced that I will start doing a lot more work with B&W HDR. I do believe I see a future magazine article on the topic. This was taken on Friday evening around 1900 as we watched the storm roll in. ISO 200; 1/800 sec @ f / 11.
