Archive for the ‘Black & White’ Category

Snow Dayz In Texas

On Thursday (Feb 11th) it started snowing in North Texas. It’s rare, so I made sure to enjoy it with the boys. For the first time we were actually able to build a real snowman and have snowball fights with the neighbors. I was able to get some nice photos over the last couple of days.

The biggest thing I had to remember was to decrease the aperture because my first set of pictures came out all white. I thought my camera was on the fritz, but realized I had it set to 2.8 for some indoor shots I was taking earlier. I lowered it to 8 and everything was all good. I also threw in some black and white shots.

Better in Black & White

There are times when a good idea for a photo goes wrong. I’ve had many of those moments and most of the pictures get deleted. But there are those times when I’m able to figure out a way to turn a bad picture into a better one.

The first one is a photo of my office hallway. I happened to be walking down the hall and thought, “this would make a cool picture”. I stood at one end of the hall and shot a couple of images at 55mm, then I zoomed out to 18mm. The shots always look decent on the viewfinder, but when I got home all the shots didn’t look right. Then I decided to rotate the image and convert it to black & white. I cropped, adjusted the contrast and added a vignette to darken it up a little to get the image below.

This second set of pictures was taken at a church pumpkin patch. My idea was to get the sun flare behind my son with him looking into the camera. Well, he was getting fussy and looked up instead of at the camera. I took a picture just so I could get something and move on. When editing the picture I tried a couple of things, but nothing worked. I couldn’t get the color to look right, so I took a couple of days to think of something else. Once again converting to black & white helped again. I also adjusted the contrast and got rid of some of the sun flare in the right top corner.

Here’s the picture on a magazine cover that I got done at Walgreens. I would have liked for him to be on Jet or Ebony, but TV Guide worked for now. He really is going to be an entertainer. The kid loves attention.

Ridin’ Solo

I blogged about one of theses photos on theotalks.net and wanted to share the rest of them on this blog. I was excited to see my son ride by himself and it was definitely a moment I wanted to capture. The shots came out pretty good in color, but I thought the black & white would be something different. I’d seen some other people on flickr shoot in b&w, so I thought I’d give it a try also.

For the post processing I added some contrast, cropped and a circular vignette. I thought the vignette caused some of the pictures to be darker than they should, but I think that may be due to my monitor. My favorite picture out of the group is the one of my youngest son walking over to help his big brother with the bike after a crash.

First Photo

This is one of the first photos that I took with my D80 that I thought came out pretty good. I was just snapping pictures of my son playing in the park and I caught him just before he started rocking back and forth. It just so happened the sun was in a good place and didn’t affect the lighting. I did crop and add a soft glow in Gimp during post-processing.