Relearning Black and White

Back in my large-format film days, I used to joke that I saw in black and white, and that I only saw in color when I was getting paid.  That was true back then, but not nearly so now.  Still, for as much as I talk about learning to see again in black and white, my recent efforts at the Japanese Gardens reminded me that in addition to seeing, there’s a lot of developing skills in black and white that I need to re-learn as well before my B&W images are as good as they should be.

You see, I’d forgotten that it wasn’t just the seeing that led to stunning images, it was the plethora of darkroom techniques I used to create a print that conveyed the feeling I had when I pressed the cable release to expose the image on film.  There was how best to develop the negative, which paper grade to choose, and then the detailed burning and dodging steps (all recorded on detailed notes so I could recreate the print later) that would ultimately lead to a successful image.  While it’s so much easier to do each step now than it was before, it still requires the equivalent of each of those steps to make a successful image today.  The tools are different, but the demands aren’t.  

I have Len to thank for helping me improve two of the images from my recent trip - one improved version that you’ve seen already, the other improved version you haven’t.  He pointed me to a blog post by a photographer (Bruce Percy) I follow (though not closely enough lately), which led to watching a couple of youtube videos - one by Bruce Percy, and another by a different photographer (Charles Cramer) Bruce recommended watching.  Given the images concern two different aspects of image making, I thought it worthwhile to look at both of the images.

You’ve seen the first image if you’ve read the recent Japanese Garden posts.  It was a composition that I described as problematic.  The image that was posted wasn’t nearly as disturbing as the same image before the lightbulb went off in my head about visual balance through the use of tones. 

Take a long look at the image above, and then a long look at just the image below.

The only difference between the two images is that I darkened (burned) some of the mosses on the left side of the frame, particularly the area in the bottom left side.  If you look at the image on the bottom for more than a few seconds, it starts rotating to the right.  Stare at it long enough, and it becomes nauseating.  

I almost didn’t include the image in the blog post for just that reason.  But then, in one of the videos (well, Bruce mentioned it too, but I watched that video the next day, after I'd fixed the image), Charles Cramer discussed the visual weight of tones in images and that sometimes you have to burn (darken) areas simply to add balance to the image.  Duh!  How often had I done that in my darkroom days?  And how could I have forgotten that?

Still, after doing my best Homer Simpson imitation, I realized that I had a solution to my spiraling-out-of-control image.  All I had to do is darken the left hand corner.  So I ran back into my office and burned the corner a bit, making the grays just a few shades darker.   I’m not sure that I’ve darkened it enough yet - sometimes it seems balanced, sometimes not quite - but it’s much better than it was.  

The second example comes from watching Bruce Percy’s talk.  You really should check out his images, particularly the ones from the Altiplano, the interior of Iceland, and Hokkaido in the winter.  Much like Michael Kenna’s work, they are simple, and clean.  They’re also in color (different than Michael), and, lately, square (the same as Michael).  What they are not is a literal interpretation of the landscape.  But they are stunning!

In Bruce Percy’s talk, he discussed aggressively manipulating the tonal values in some of his images (hard to imagine when you look at them) to capture what he was feeling when he looked at the images.  I flashed back a day to Charles Cramer talking about how Ansel Adams would do the same.  Charlie then told the story about an image (“Mt. McKinley and Wonder Lake”) where Ansel made the sky nearly black through burning just to get the mountain (Denali/Mt. McKinley)  to glow as it did when he was there making the photograph

Bruce and Charlie made me think about why I wasn’t fully satisfied with the image below that I used in the blog post.  While I had worked it a bit to give some depth to the image, I’d forgotten why I made the image.  So I decided to get a bit (read: a lot) more aggressive and try to make the image look the way I felt when I made the image.

In only a couple of minutes this is what I had.

Now that’s much closer to what I felt.  

Hopefully, I’ll remember these lessons.