B+W Exploration

I edit photos all the time– much more than I've been shooting these days. For me it can be a good palette cleanser from more systematic/strategic types of work. And while I've come a long way in how I go about my editing, I'm still looking to continue to refine my craft. Looking for ways to push the edges a bit to become more nuanced and knowledgeable.. and it's almost always been in alternative techniques to color grading. As the word choice implies... this involves color, because color is very dynamic in nature and there's so many different ways to add/remove color in tools like Lightroom or Davinci Resolve.

Because of that, an opportunity to grow was hiding right under my nose in the realm of black and white. For better or worse, I thought black and white was largely nuking the saturation and then playing around with exposure and the black-point to create something of a feeling. Of course I always knew there was more nuance there, but I never took the time to dive into it and understand it. Well, after something of an edible, I dove in and started finding some fun ways to create comparable amounts of emotion in black and white as in color. In someways its a back-to-basics sort-of-moment by focusing on the fundamentals. Ive come a long way in my understand of tonal values in my images, but there's always more to learn, and sometimes color can be something of a distraction.

This image in particular jumped out as a way another step in the quest of 'vintage feels'. The previous version was a solid start, but this one achieves it better, and not by aggressively stunting the dynamic range. The subject-matter was also great to test on as there are tons of vintage photos of the golden gate bridge, so I think my brain already could validate whether or not this edit was in-line with those. I definitely won't pretend that it's nailed it, but it certainly feels like a step in the right direction.

The exploration... continues.

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Also keep an eye out for some additional black and white presets that will be coming as a by-product of this research. Lots of products lined up for release.