Rediscovered - Painted Hills 2016
As I mentioned in the “Breaking Up is Hard to Do” blog post, I was hoping to use the importing into Capture One process as an opportunity to revisit some of my images. And while I haven’t really been able to take the time to review the images as they’re being imported, images have occasionally caught my eye and I’ve flagged them for future development. Earlier this week, as I opened up Capture One to get images for another blog post I was writing, the 2016 catalog came up and I couldn’t turn away from the image that was displayed on my monitor. So I decided to work on it. Not once, but twice!
The image was one I’d forgotten about, taken during one of our several trips to the Painted Hills in 2016. And while lately I’ve been frustrated in making night images due to less-than-satisfying results, the image on the screen really conveyed that sense of standing outside on a full moon (after your eyes have adjusted) that is so hard to record in a photograph.
As Ann and I have continued our importing of images (at way too slow a pace) and our periodic working on them, we’ve both commented on how it seems that the images look more natural (and better) in Capture One than in Lightroom. This is true of images even on straight-import. It’s simultaneously thrilling and depressing. I sometimes feel as if we wasted so much time with the other program. I then remind myself that Capture One wasn’t quite what it is now even a couple of years ago so . . . . In any event, it’s images like this that make me appreciate the tools we have access to. The reality is, Lightroom isn’t bad. Unless you think all of the blog images I’ve been posting before were bad. It’s like cameras - pretty much any decent camera makes excellent quality images, certainly compared to older 35 mm cameras, but each is a bit different and each has its qualities and quirks. Yes, some (particularly lenses) are better than others, but you can only tell by comparison and have developed the sensitivity to distinguish between them, or when you use them in difficult conditions, or blow up images really, really large. I guess perhaps it’s me that’s improved enough to tell the difference between Capture One and Lightroom. Either way, both Ann and I are happy that we’ve transferred to Capture One.
As I was working on the above image, I started to think about it in black and white. More importantly, how the colors of the image could be rendered in black and white. In my film days I had a litany of colored filters in my bag to help alter the tonal relationships in an image. The one rule to remember was that a filter will lighten its own color and darken its compliment. The easiest example to comprehend is to think of wispy clouds on a light blue sky. Often in black and white prints, you’d barely see the clouds if at all. Add a yellow filter, and the blue would darken somewhat, so you’d see the white clouds. Add a red filter and the blue skies would go very dark. And if you had a red rose in the scene, it would appear as white.
I realized that if I converted the image above into black and white using a simulated red filter, the blue skies should darken to help reveal the clouds and stars and the reds in the landscape should lighten somewhat (they’re not actually red, but a color that contains some red in it) - all contributing to a “night time” effect. A couple of clicks later and I knew I was on to something.
So I kept on working with the image to see if I could give it that night time presence in black and white.
One of the things I appreciate about this transition process is having to think in new ways simply because the tools operate differently. Between working on the previous trip images, the periodic image that catches my eye, and some folios I’m starting to develop in Capture One, I’ve been giving a lot of thought into how one should approach developing an image. Most of these are “old” images; many I developed in Lightroom to a high degree of satisfaction. Some I even still have the making of the image fresh in my mind, though most of those are from 2018. But each of them are basically a clean slate because the Capture One import process didn’t include any of my previous adjustments. It’s almost like working with negatives in a dark room, every time you go in to print you’re producing a new expression of the image.
Working in Capture One I’ve slowed down in my development process. In part because of learning a new tool and in part because of the way Capture One operates. And for me, I think, that’s good. In Lightroom I’d gotten to the point where everything was so familiar that I’d immediately jump in and start adjusting things to make the image look “better,” with the usual result that the images did. Capture One is a lot like Photoshop (a program I do not know or use) in that you develop the image in various “layers.” That has gotten me into thinking about what I want each layer to do and how to name each layer. You don’t have to name a layer (it will say Layer 1, Layer 2, etc unless you change the name), but I’ve found that naming my layers makes me stop and think about what I’m doing and what I want the layer to accomplish. That leads me to thinking more about what I want the end result to be at the start of the process. That’s something I now realize I often lost when working in Lightroom. Certainly, that focus on what I wanted to capture in my photograph and what I want the end result to feel like is not critical for every image I work on, but for the important work it is. So slowing down a bit, thinking more about the end result, should benefit my images.
Plus, it gets me closer to the way I used to work in the darkroom. And for me, that’s a wonderful thing.