Black and white or colour or both?

Digital is a wonderful thing as even the cheapest compacts offer dedicated black and white shooting modes as well as a full range of "film" speeds although most are unusable above 200 iso! These examples are from the Canon G9 and follow on from reading several Ricoh GR Digital blogs where the photographers use their cameras exclusively as black and white cameras and I have shot various tests and love the tonal quality of the b/w mode straight out of the camera.

Of course great to have the option of both - no changing film, midway through a roll and no need to have multiple rolls of film of different speeds and the 2Gb card holds over 370 images - that's over ten rolls of 36 exposure film!

Testing, testing, 1 2 3 . . .

Following on from the last post, these images are further tests for Saturday's wedding in Knightsbridge. I predict and hope that the ambient light in Wilton Crescent will be greater than the streets off Rayner's Lane but this was a great test to see where the light level was and how much flash I could use.



Here you see colour, sepia and black an white renderings from the shoot - all shot at 1600 iso and processed through Lightroom and looking good.



I shot with a D200 c/w a 50mm f1.4 lens that was having problems focusing and I had to move Hannah from shade to an area lit with the street light and then the focusing was better and when viewed no screen all was fine. Flash was an SB24 c/w full CT orange filter on the flash at 1/16th power and through a small Chimera softbox all triggered with Pocket Wizards. The CT filter balanced the flash and ambient quite well as I have had to balance many none filtered images in the past and it is hard and extra work that a little gel can fix so simply.

All looks good and roll on Saturday!!!

Test shoot for the Mall

Saturday's wedding has a couple of challenging picture opportunities that will work but I needed to test to speed things and avoid time wasting on the day. Therefore I packed the car with the necessary bits and pieces that will be used on Saturday and set up in a local carpark that overlooks common land that stretches south to Harrow. I tried to choose an area and backdrop that would match the Gates opposite Buckingham Palace as closely as possible and hopefully give a realistic result that will be similar to Saturday. In fact I think this area is darker than our spot just off the Mall - so things can only get better! Our area has ample space to park (briefly) two cars, the couples vintage car and mine - as long as there aren't any tv satelite trucks around. The next problem will be trying not to attract too much attention with the cars and the flash and if you read headlines like "General's daughter, new husband and photographer arrested at Buckingham Palace security breach" in the Sundays - you will know exactly who was involved! Hopefully with this preparation and a bit of luck - we should be in and out before the Plod notices.

The above was shot with two SB00s - one on the camera and dialed down by three stops and the other on a stand to the left at 1/8th power and triggered with Pocket Wizards. The camera will be on a tripod to allow me to drop the shutter speed for the ambient light and fingers crossed we will have some very nice images . . .



The sunset above was actually shot before I started the flash and car test shoot. Strange how one can shoot one frame of a reasonable sunset and then Lightroom it to death to create something more exotic! I hope you note - Lightroom to death . . . rather than Photoshop? One can do so much in Lightroom - leaving Photoshop for the real heavy pixel editing.

Scan results . . .

Having shot a test roll of Fujicolour 400 neg film on Friday and Saturday morning the film was finally processed late on Monday by Kenton Photographic. The processing was delayed as they no longer process daily and only turn on the machine when there is enough demand - sign of the times? The old EOS 5 film camera seems to work fine but the Fisheye lens is far from crisp wide open at f4. As well as testing the lens at this aperture, I also shot stopped down and these frames are better - still not knock out sharp but better. The image above is where I see this lens being useful and this was shot in Pinner Parish Church on a very bright day and still the exposure was 1/15th sec at f4 at 400iso - just on the edge of everything. I will try the camera/lens combination at Saturday's wedding and as I'll have the tripod with me I might even use it for these images - seems the obvious solution. As regards metering, I was over exposing the film by almost two stops and this gave me healthy negatives and I know that Harrow's Snappy Snaps can push C41 at least a stop. Might check that as it's been a few years since they had to do that for me.



This is a 100% section from the bottom edge - not too unsharp and a reasonable size. This would just about cover a double page spread of an A4 Wedding Book.