Pairings
I’d mentioned in the last post that when we headed out into Ivansson’s Junkyard Car Cemetery, I went “light” with just a couple of cameras with me. My going “light” gear pretty much always includes the Q2MR because that camera seems to get me looking and seeing things differently and, well, it photographs only in black and white. So it forces me to see things differently because the types of images that will be successful in black and white is much more narrow than those with a normal camera that shoots color. The other camera I had with me was naturally a color camera, and I’d put on a single, prime lens that roughly equated to the Q2MR’s field of view (ok, more like the first of the in-camera Q2MR crop modes, which I often use).
As one might expect, there were a few times where I wasn’t sure which camera a potential image was better suited to (B&W or color (yes, I know you can make a black and white image from a color RAW file, but doing that is not the same as shooting in black and white), so I opted for making a similar image with both cameras. Here are a selection of those “pairings.” You decide which ones you prefer.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that wider exterior views of cars generally weren’t that interesting. Instead, getting in closer made for better images and ultimately, sticking my head inside the vehicle often made for the most interesting images.
That of course led to low-light, hand-holding issues and dynamic range concerns, but surprisingly, except for a couple of images, I managed to find ways to brace myself for the longer exposures and to get workable results. Face it, the sensors these days are near-amazing in terms of how you can work the digital files after you’ve made the image. You could not have made either of these images with film (particularly the color image below).
I think our wanderings through Ivansson’s Junkyard Car Cemetery was a good lesson in attentiveness. It really was glimpses of something, like a car window through a car window that, if you’re receptive, cause you to stop and explore that vehicle a bit more. In a place like Ivansson’s, everything quickly starts looking the same (it’s not so different from walking through a woodland). It was one of those glimpses that led to the images below. And while it was the shattered effect of the glass that first caught my eye, and then how it reproduced the shadows on the wall behind the window that led me to conclude an image was to be made, it was while composing the black and white image that upon closer examination I saw the color and realized that color truly added to the image.
That didn’t mean, though, that I didn’t make the black and white image I first saw. I did, and then switched to the color camera. Each has its own qualities. It’s rare that an image can work so well in both black and white and color.
The exercise of trying to see in both color and black and white had its value. This pairing below in particular made me very attentive to the impact of color. What first caught my eye was the yellow splash on the blue car’s hood by the light. That color combination is particularly attractive due to the fact that they are complimentary colors. It was while I was framing the image with a slight wide-angle lens (and realizing I needed to get closer to the vehicles) that I realized the same complimentary pairing was true for the red car and the green vegetation around it at the top of the image. So I wound up working my framing to take advantage of those colors to include two complimentary color pairings in the image.
When I switched to the Q2MR, all that was lost, so I decided to move in even closer and to focus on differing tonal values and vehicle components to bring more focus on the clash of shapes, textures and tones.
I guess that was the theme of our stop that morning - having fun with image making and learning along the way. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t still play, even if we are in our 60’s!