Images

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B&W toning – but in the midtones only

Looking down my own blog entries, and finding the one about Laura Wilson (mother of Owen and his brothers), I wondered how that horse photo of hers was made. So I checked, and the values for RGB in the midtones of this black & white image were decimal 150, 145, and 141, or hex 96, 91, and 8d. Which explains why it looks brownish rather than grey. But the whites are white, and the blacks are black – so I tried that myself. On this 16:9 selfie one:

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Interesting. I made a preset in RawTherapee for it, so I don\’t have to perform that many mouse-clicks to (re) produce these mid-toned black & white images.

So here\’s one from the colleagues photo session from last month. Same treatment as above:

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And here\’s my ColorChecker with that same treatment:

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Finally, a direct comparison between neutral grey and the treatment from above, as thumbnails from my nautilus file browser:

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So that\’s the reason I\’m doing this.

Thanks for viewing, as always.

Update/Edit from August 16th, 2018:

Sorry – totally forgot to show you where to find this in RawTherapee. Well at home I have version 5.x, but even version 4.2 at work has the possibility to do this, under the \’Color\’ tab, and then under \’Color Toning\’. Just select the right method of Shadows/Midtones/Highlights, then adjust those midtones as you see in my example of Sarah:

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Thanks again for reading.

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Trying to see squares

I was reminded of some great (and famous) photographers lately, who used square format cameras and films, like the twin-eyed Rolleiflex to name a famous piece of gear. The difference in composition? These cameras were mostly held at breast height, and viewed from above. On their ground glass – with or without a magnifying loupe – you saw a square image, half mirror-inverted. Meaning that when/if you moved the camera right, the picture on the ground glass would move left, and vice versa.

I\’ve seen so many good photos from that time that I started to wonder how it would be to use my small Micro Four Thirds camera that way (because that\’s all I have, folks). Luckily I have the E-M10 which has a tilting screen, and if I move it 90 degrees upwards then I can use this as a fake ground glass, with or without magnification, but not mirror-reversed (would be funny to have that implemented in firmware I guess). If I switch the camera to black & white I can already see the photo in black and white before I even take it – definitely an advantage compared to the film days when you had to wait for development to see anything.

Just playing around with my camera set up that way, today I took this:

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Sleepy cat, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2018

Yes, it\’s square. And yes, it\’s black & white (both in camera and in \”post production\” which was to first reduce contrast with Olympus Viewer 3, then to apply the 019 \”Fine Art\” preset in Silver Efex Pro2, and with RawTherapee (on Linux) to add some title and Exif information).

Yes, it\’s a sleepy cat. And yes, this is fun, really. Modern day Rolleiflex or Mamiya 330.

Thanks for viewing.

P.S.: here\’s another one. Same cat, same day, a few hours later…

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Looking at my camera strap, Moerfelden-Walldorf 2018

Thanks again for viewing.

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Cat on the fence, at dusk

When I went out for a smoke last time, Tuna joined me. And instead of leaving our veranda through the fence, this time she decided to just sit on it. It was getting dark already, and tho the sky looks very bright here – in fact it\’s overblown in this picture – this is ISO 2000 with the lens opened to f/2, at 1/80th of a second, so it was darker than it may look here. I applied \”auto gradation\”, but no noise reduction, and did only minimal post processing like always:

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By the way, I like Flickr\’s new image viewer a lot, especially the small camera and lens symbols and the exif data, if the photo has some. The dark background is also kind of cool. Very well done, bravo!

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Thanks for viewing.

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Two photos which I took today

During the last three days I didn\’t take a single photo, which is unusual. And today I took four, of which I\’ll show two here, both from the lunch walk with my colleague Arno:

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These new Telekom buildings

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Tubular bells

Thinking about those images on Flickr, they all have links to this blog which are now broken. Still haven\’t figured out what to do with them – I cannot edit some 2,000 image descriptions…

Update: ok, here\’s another one which I took minutes ago, in very low light (only from the kitchen, next room). As you can see, we need new coffee cups soon. ISO 5000, no noise reduction:

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Mitchie\’s coffee cup

Thanks for reading.