Meditations In Black-And-White
A business proposal led to a new avenue of creativity
I recently had a client ask to see some images – Black & White nature photographs for a corporate environment. Since I haven’t made B&W photos at all during my career, except on a rare occasion, I was surprised. However, her simple request led me down a path that was both creative as well as successful in terms of business. I have long been inspired by great B&W photography masters such as Ansel Adams, Edward and Brett Weston, Minor White and Paul Caponigro, which has lead me to try a few conversions over the past years using Photoshop. You never know from where inspiration will come, but this project ignited my passion for B&W and pushed me to expand my photographic repertoire.
Ansel Adams used to proudly declare in his lectures that he had been a commercial photographer for sixty years! He would then explain that his many years of making a living from his photography taught him valuable lessons. During his career, he accepted assignments to make portraits, still life product shots, architectural work and more. He felt that the problem-solving nature of commercial work informed and improved his art in terms of discipline and technique. Practice makes perfect, so they say. My B&W project provides a good example of creative results coming from a practical assignment.
The first step was to prepare and send jpgs to my client for her PowerPoint presentation. I received a list of color images that she found in the many web portfolios on my web site. My assistant John and I compiled a portfolio using the Collections in Adobe Lightroom, which proved very useful for previewing potential images using the Grayscale function part of the Develop mode. I have learned that many color photographs don’t convert well to B&W so by simply clicking on Grayscale, the color is removed and an assessment can be quickly made. Additionally, Grayscale offers sliders that allow adjustments to improve your conversion. Once my B&W portfolio was edited down for my client, we easily made JPGs using the Export function of Lightroom and emailed them to her for her presentation.
A few weeks later, I received an order for seven 30×40 fine art B&W prints! This was great news of course, but now the real work began. Each image had to be fully refined and mastered in Photoshop, then prepared for making the final photographs. Each image file began with the high res original film scan or digital capture. Next, adjustments to each image was made using multiple Adjustment Layers. Some layers were globally applied to the whole image. Depending on each photograph, other layers were applied using local masking. For example, if shadow detail needed improving, the mask would be specific to that area. The use of masks is much like the “old fashion” dodging and burning used when printing film to paper.
The main tool to convert my color images to B&W, was the Black and White adjustment layer (Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Black and White). We have found this to be the most versatile adjustment method. One thing I learned from viewing Ansel Adams’ prints is the value of tonal separation. I worked in his Yosemite gallery for five years, handled and exhibited many of his most famous images. His prints show a fine degree of detail in both shadows and highlights. The whites are never washed out and we can see many gradations of light grays and white. I especially love how his shadow areas show each subtle tone of dark gray and blacks. His shadows are never really black and formless, but show clear shapes and form within them.
It was Ansel’s inspirational prints that guided the B&W processing for this project. Once the images were finished in Photoshop, the printing began. Each file was sized to the final output dimensions, then sharpened for that specific size. The latest inkjet printers do an excellent job of handling B&W in their output. I used my Canon Imageprograf, and I was very pleased with the results. We shipped them off, and the client was pleased too. Job done.
Now for a little Marketing 101 – follow trends, and give clients what they want! Black and white photographs are in demand. I have noticed more and more mention of them in magazines, on commercial web sites selling photographic art, With the success from this one sale, we decided that other clients might find my newly created B&W images useful for their corporate art projects. In order to show them, we decided to put together a whole new portfolio. The fun and creative part of this process was sorted through thirty years of work, searching for images that would survive as strong images when converted. Once the editing was done, we used Lightroom’s Web module to create an online set of B&W landscape and nature images. I then sent the URL to my email client list. If they don’t know what you’ve got, you can’t sell it!
The final step in this creative journey was the making of a ebook entitled Meditations in Monochrome (http://ift.tt/1XxyjwZ). I have “published” two previous ebooks, and made them available as an inexpensive downloads from my web site. My apprentice John O’Connor (http://ift.tt/202IJ6g) produced a beautiful layout in Adobe InDesign and created a high res PDF file. I wrote an essay for the books’ introduction. I selected 52 photographs for this digital portfolio, ranging from classic western landscapes to intimate details of nature. Locations include the coast of New England, the deserts of the Southwest and my backyard in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The selection covers a wide span of my career, with photographs dating from 1982 to many recent digital captures created as recently as 2008.
Becoming a better photographer is about building skills. It is also about following ones’ passions, and pushing oneself creatively. My Meditations project started with a business deal that opened a door that I had wanted to go through for a long time – adding a Black and White portfolio to my collection of images. I hope Ansel would be proud!
via 500px http://ift.tt/1snRRru
Sig Nordal 