Black and White Image – Shearing

I spent a couple of hours photographing the shearing at South Gap Station in outback South Australia. All colour digital, I’m afraid, with a subject lending itself to black and white images.

Click for a larger view
Black and white image produced from a digital colour photo. Shearing at the South Gap woolshed.

My days of genuine black and white photography seem to be over. Although I still admire good black and white photos and long to produce them, I just can’t face the long days and nights spent in a small, dark room, lit by a dull, amber light and standing on a concrete floor.

Digital cameras have just about finished film off in the few short years since their introduction. Black and white film, paper and chemicals are getting quite hard to buy and commercial black and white services are now quite rare. Genuine black and white photography has become pretty much the province of the art photographer.

Of course, digital images can be converted quite easily to black and white, but most of what I see of this medium is garbage, whether on the web or as digital prints. The people turning the stuff out clearly have no appreciation of the rich tonal quality of a traditional black and white photographic print.

The black and white image reproduced on this page is made from a digital colour photo. I’ve tried to mimic my style from the old days of the darkroom.

Using black and white film, light skin tones are achieved by using a red, orange or yellow filter, red being the more extreme. So I decomposed the colour file to RGB (red, green, blue), discarding the green and blue channels.

The red channel approximated the image I’d have got using black and white film and a red filter.

Then I used the curves dialog to increase the contrast, giving the image a curve something like the characteristic curve of black and white film.

The result is a digital, black and white image that I feel OK about. I’ve done a print and I reckon that it’s as good a job as any digitally produced black and white prints that I’ve seen in quite some time.

My main regret about the image is that I haven’t dodged the eyes to get some detail into the shadows.

So what do you reckon about my black and white photo, created digitally? You may comment in the box below, if you wish.