Interpreting Black and White, Part I

First of all, many thanks to everyone who sent me their conversions of the picture yesterday or this morning. I've gotten about a hundred and fifty as I begin writing this post, so obviously I can't show them all, but, just as obviously, the more the merrier for me. It was fun to see them all, as it was fascinating to read your comments. Thanks very much to one and all.

I'll limit the ones I'll show to a dozen or two—and they won't just be the ones I think are "best." I don't think there's any "this is best" in play here, actually; at no time did I find myself thinking in terms of "best" or "worst." I'm not saying I like everybody's equally (this isn't kindergarten, and I don't) or that you should, but I took the exercise at its face value—people are imposing on the picture how they like to see B&W, or how they like to see this image in B&W. So, okay. We're all essentially talking about our own tastes. Not a contest.

First of all, here's mine:

I'd play it pretty straight; this is definitely informed by my style with film. The key for me is to go up to the cliff's edge but not over it with those tempting clouds. I'd want them to have a nice rich glow in the print but stay gentle.

I should mention, though, that if I were printing an image like this for real—with an inkjet printer or in the darkroom, either one—I would consider this the guide print stage. The next step would be to put the print up on the viewing board for 1–3 days and look at it. Sooner or later, I would know how I felt about it, and then I'd know what I wanted to do with it...whether I wanted to take it further, or dial it back, or change something, or leave it as-is, whatever. Not till that point would I go make the final version.

To me, that interval is a critically important stage of making a fine print. A little time going by does wonders to clarify your mind. Call it eyeball time. The looking is what does the work.

Several readers, like Mark Muse, made conversions that were quite close to mine—maybe differing in detail, but not in overall feel. Walter Glover's was very close to mine but he added a rich sepia color, as he confessed to "a hankering for warm-tone or Chloro-Bromide prints." Others, for instance Mark Steigelman, Carl Root and Jim Bullard, took the same basic vibe but went a little hotter and darker.

Perhaps the closest doppelgänger of mine was sent in by Ricardo Silva Cordeiro, who's a graphic designer by trade. If you look closely—the differences are subtle—you'll notice that he's gone for a little harder sharpness in the land area and a little less in the sky. And note how that choice emphasizes the contrasting corporeality or materiality of the elements in the picture: his tree's a bit more of a solid object and his clouds a little more vaporous. Certainly a defensible choice.

Lynn Burdekin's made me feel like Ricardo and I had gone a little too far and hadn't kept it soft enough. "To me this is a 'Rural Romantic' image," Lynn writes, "so I wanted to bring out a soft, romantic feel—as if I were a painter admiring the scene from an easel, rather than a photographer holding a camera."

Here's one of the several "sepia" treatments—this one is from Steve Lincoln. "This was fun. I used CS5, a B&W adjustment layer with some blue and cyan tweaks, a layer mask to lighten the foreground.... Then I converted to a bronze duo-tone and added a border, which the duo-tone renders in a nice creamy off-white. I often use the bronze duo-tone for this type of landscape—looks great in print."

Steve spotted out the hawk!

One of the first ones to come in, from Animesh Ray, shows a very different approach to tonality, especially in the balance between sky and land. To me it makes it look like much later in the evening. I like the tonality of some of Animesh's film pictures and even featured one on the blog once! But his choice here is much more radical than anything I'd do.

Speaking of tonality, let your eyes go back and forth between Sergey Botvin's restrained, almost plainspoken interpretation and Simon Crofts' more florid "verging-on-IR" take, below:

Those are very different photographs.

Implying no criticism of Simon's choices, I will say I admire Sergey's version. It's got a no-nonsense quality to it, sort of the opposite of some of the most over-the-top versions. Jeff Hohner's was quite close to Sergey's. Neither calls attention to technique, and that can be a plus.

We'll get to some other issues in the next post (Part II), but before I close this one I'll just note that with so many entries, there was naturally a range of the basic tonal choices. Some people made the blacks blacker, some dodged under the tree; some increased the sturm und drang of the clouds and some deemphasized them. I'll leave you with two tonal outliers. Rory O'Toole, in the upper of these last two pictures, has made the clouds light and ethereal, while simultaneously lightening the land and greatly increasing its contrast. Neils Volkmann, in the lower picture, has darkened everything, especially the clouds (although you'll notice he uses less contrast in the field and trees):

We're thoroughly into "technique head" here (i.e., a technical mindset), but see if you can back off from that for a moment and just look at these two pictures in terms of their emotional effect and the overall sense that they'd communicate to you if either were the only version of this picture you'd ever seen. They convey very different "weather reports," and the feeling-tone they convey is greatly divergent as well.

I'm not sure I could support the following convincingly in a debate, but I've heard—and I think I believe—that the best printers tend to be the ones who go beyond "applications of technique" and think mostly about the feel of what they're trying to convey. What sense should this simple picture impart to viewers? Is its fidelity to the actual weather conditions important to you or not? How much is the picture "about" the birds? (They're emphasized in Rory's version, you'll note, and almost unnoticeable in Niels's.) I'm not saying the feel of either of these is wrong or right—they're just artistic choices, that any photographer would be applying to any picture they'd taken themselves. But it runs a considerable gamut, especially in  black-and-white.

In the next post, we'll get into the issue of transforming the picture into something entirely separate from the observable scene. 

Mike

[Note: An early version of this post was lost, and a number of readers responded to my desperate pleas for help by sending me cached copies from their readers so I could reconstruct it. A very big "THANK YOU!" to each and every one of them, especially Carsten Bockermann, whose copy reached me first and was used to reconstruct what you see here.

All I can say is: Whew! —MJ]

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Ricardo Cordeiro: I really like Lynn Burdekin's more restrained approach to the image too (it's my favourite of the bunch actually), maybe just a tiny bit more contrast to give some more volume to the scene and I think it would be perfect ;-) . And you're right about the 'eyeball time'; even before reading this post I looked at my version today and I it seemed a bit over-cooked. I have a tendency towards it because much of my B&W conversions at work are for commercial use and require a certain 'punch.'"

Comments

[Andrew Molitor]

Ricardo's comment is telling.

Sometimes I find myself "overcooking" digital because I am used to wet prints flattening out a bit as they dry. I instinctively jam the sliders a little further out than I really feel they ought to go. Sometimes I like the result anyways ;)

[christian harkness]

I made my first print in 1956 when I was one of the photographers on our high school yearbook staff. We used the Speed Graflex for all of our work, even football games. Every once in a while I would sneak in some 35 mm work I had done with my Contaflex. So, I think I have seen the real thing you have simulated in the last couple of posts.

I have tremendously enjoyed reading the posts and comments. Reflecting on things I think I would have 'killed' to get my prints to look like:

"2012
(Panasonic mirrorless, OIS zoom, RAW, Lightroom 3, SilverEfex Pro. "Original in color.")"

As one of my college professors used to say:

"Ya, that was back in the 'good old days' and they weren't that good."

I think there is a lot of misplaced nostalgia in many of the comments.

[Steve L.]

Very interesting to see the differences. Glad to see I'm not the only one to spot out that pesky hawk.

[Mike Johnston]

"I am used to wet prints flattening out a bit as they dry. I instinctively jam the sliders a little further out than I really feel they ought to go."

That's funny. You're compensating for drydown.

Old habits die hard....

Mike

[Zeeman]

I can smell the Tri-X in your interpretation, Mike...

Lynn's on the other hand reminds me of FP4+, a film I loved. (As you'll see, my interpretation is very similar to hers, only with darker shadows.)

[Rory O'Toole]

Funny you mention my treatment of the birds. I actually took two of them out!

[Jeff]

Ansel could have done a similar post with his own variations on Moonrise, as shown in the link I provided not long ago... http://www.andrewsmithgallery.com/exhibitions/anseladams/arrington/arrington_adams.html

One has to wonder how he would have viewed Photoshop, especially given that he anticipated new electronic photo technologies.

[Stan B.]

Whenever I printed in the darkroom I could always tell when I had reached my proper contrast- it was the point where the highlights and shadows ceased to print acceptably in the original exposure, details would just disappear in the highlights and shadows; in other words I had reached that "magical" point where every nook and cranny (esp in a WA shot with several light sources) would have to be dodged and burned relentlessly, and then bleached there after- another night in hell.

I don't consider myself a contrast freak, but I do think a "proper" dosage is what gives B&W its strength. Things are infinitely easier when one prefers softer images.

[cb]

Funny, I don't like any of the presented version. All to shy.

[John Roberts]

I'm always fascinated by how many interpretations there can be of the same photograph, each evoking different moods and emotions. After looking at all of these, there were only a couple I didn't care for at all, but among the rest I couldn't pick a favorite. I occasionally find myself with this same dilemma when I experiment with different versions of one of my own photos. Frustrating, but fun all the same.

[Ted Durant]

I wonder how much a person's vision for the image is driven by where they live. For example, I live about 20 miles from Mike, and his version resonates quite strongly with me. When I look at it I say, "I recognize that light, yah for sure. Seen that a couple, three times, you betcha."

[Paul Mc Cann]

This belongs in a text book. I found it one of the most interesting, informative and illuminating posts in a long time

[n r von staden]

Very interesting excercise....I guess a photojournalist would think about the weather and try to reproduce the shot to as he//she saw it...but turing on the artist in a photographer, I guess you can do as you wish and spot out the "hawks" in life.

[Gary]

Thanks for this reminder that the difficult part of photography is not HOW to get a certain picture or look, but rather WHAT picture or look to get.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

You know, I never really thought of printing this to emphasize the birds. Rory's version works rather well that way.

The Neils Volkmann is kind of the way I was thinking, except I didn't dare push the clouds that far. But I wasn't fully satisfied with the clouds in my version, either. I played with a lot of things in channel mixer and I played with photo filters, and never really got what I wanted out of the clouds, and ended up masking the sky and just giving them their own adjustment layer. Maybe I should have just pulled down that mid-point another quarter inch.

The worst thing I've seen happen to this picture (many times in versions I didn't send in, for example) is when the sky ends up looking wimpy. That sky just isn't wimpy, that's wrong. (Apparently I have some strong opinions about what the picture can be about!)

Several of the version you feature seem to me to have levels of noise in the sky (mostly the sky itself, not the clouds) that I find objectionable at the inline web resolution (so I hate to think what they'd look like printed a decent size).

I find the sepia treatment surprisingly likable -- given that I have kind of a thing against warm-toned B&W prints.

[Mike Johnston]

"I don't like any of the presented version. All to shy."

A fan of bombast, eh?

Mike

[Chuck Albertson]

Isn't that the tree from The Shawshank Redemption?

[Trade Stock Online]

Just like an work of art...anything now is possible with photoshop (just singing).

[Doug Reilly]

Thanks Mike for delivering on your promise a while back to delve into digital black and white, this gives me a lot to think about. Of all of them, Rory's stands out because (and I noticed this immediately, before you pointed it out--not to point out my cleverness but rather to underscore the power of the intepretation) the birds suddenly become a major part of the composition. That might not have been my choice, but it's a powerful illustration of how black and white interpretation isn't just about feel, but also about thematic focus and context. Looking forward to part II.

[Tom Swoboda]

I liked Animesh's sky and I liked Neils' earth.

Reminds me of one of my film images that I must have printed in the wet dark room more than a hundred and fifty times and never achieved one I liked as much as the third print I made. I just had to find a better looking print and I never did.

[Michael Barkowski]

I took it, transformed the point of view, zoomed in and made it colour. How's that?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelbarkowski/295409720/

;)

[Mike Johnston]

Michael B.,
That's amazing! You've made it look almost like a different picture. [g]

Mike

[Doug Nelson]

Is Part 2 still in the works?