Lets try this again

Last night I dashed off a blog entry after viewing a photo that had been converted to Black and White by an acquaintance of mine. I didn't give it a lot of thought and upon re-reading it today it seemed a little scattered and pointless. But it started my brain to working and took me down Memory Lane for a little while but mostly I started remembering the process of morphing from a guy with a camera to a photographer. And it was Black and White that did it.

I first got the urge to become a photographer when I saw a reproduction of Edward Weston's famous shot of a pepper. It was in an art book for a course my wife was taking at Denver University. The image had a quality that was like a painting. The tonal range was amazing and the composition was almost too simple to be true. But it was a striking image and pretty much changed the course of my life. Not long after that I bought my first "serious" camera and started shooting film but at that point I was just a snapshooter. You know the type....15 shots of everything in case someone or something in the scene breathed and slightly changed position. But when Judy finished school we packed up and headed west to the Glen Fishback School of Photography in Sacramento and from the first day Black and White photography took over my life.

I was taught the nuances of exposing and processing film to obtain the ultimate in quality negatives. We were taught how to distinguish a fine Black and White print from a photograph with no color. Kurt Fishback taught us how to see the world in Black and White. We started looking past colors and seeing patterns and textures, shapes and shadows. And then came the day...we made our first prints. Dropped the paper in a tray of Dektol and were amazed when the image magically appeared. To this day the rush is still the same when I upload images from a camera memory card to my computer and pop one open in Photoshop or Lightroom. It's like digital opium .

Eventually, through my own work and from jobs in photo labs in Denver, I became a darn good printer. In fact, I became one of the best printers I know but it took several years and 10,000 or 20,000 prints to get there. Now I'm in the same position with digital photography and digital printing. There's a pretty steep learning curve and at times I struggle which brings us to the point of this blog.

The generation of young photographers out there who have basically learned their craft digitally over the past few years is populated by some amazingly talented and creative folks. I'm constantly in awe of some of the images they create and that feeling keeps me going, striving to master the digital process. Seminars, books, dvd's, you name it, I've used it to advance my ability. And I feel a kinship now with the young guys who've learned to shoot in color and are now learning Black and White. The Nik SilverEffex software for converting images to black and white is fantastic. The range of controls they offer boggles the mind. But I can see a difference in images that are converted by old B&W warhorses like me and the newer generation and here's why.

The image at the top of this blog is one I converted from color to B&W using the Nik software. It's part of a series I shot in northern New Mexico which was inspired by a portfolio of images shot by another photographer friend of mine and printed in, you guessed it, Black and White. But here's the deal: I didn't look at the color images and say "Hey, I think that would be a nice B&W print." I searched out and shot the images in this series with the express intent of converting them to Black and White. I looked at the scenes and shot them in a manner that would best lend itself to B&W reproduction. I saw the images in Black and White before I came close to pressing the shutter button. I saw the textures and the shapes. I saw the relationships between shadows and highlights.

So all of you incredibly talented shooters out there who are starting to convert some images to Black and White, take a tip from an old D-76 sniffer: Approach the image from a backwards perspective. You can go through your files looking for images that "might look good in B&W" but it's worth a try to say to yourself "if I shoot this, how can I best portray it in Black and White." I think you may be surprised by the results.