The giant fountain at Millennium Park in the hellscape we used to call, "Chicago."
(Sarcasm. Chicago is just fine...).
When I built my photography studio in downtown Austin back in the 1980s one of the things I required was a fully functional black and white darkroom. Clients were fine with big transparencies for ads because they would be drum scanned for use but black and white prints were still the gold standard for black and white (or duotone, quadratone, etc.) uses. I didn't just print for a few years and then move on to other interests. I have zero propensity for ADHD. I souped black and white film, made contact sheets and printed large black and white prints almost daily. For well over a decade. It was very rare for me to ever send out a black and white print job to an outside lab. There were always reasons but mostly it was because I was never satisfied with anyone else's interpretation of my negatives. My way of looking at finished prints.
I'll estimate that in roughly 20 years I produced about 10,000 black and white prints. And not prints just aimed at pleasing me but also aimed at pleasing the art directors who were making ads for international companies like AMD, Dell, IBM, Motorola and many more household names (well, household if you were in tech). I was well paid for the prints and nearly all of them went out not as "easy to do" RC (resin coated) prints but as toned, archival prints on double weight fiber paper. That's a level of experience with black and white printing that is generally only achieved by people who spend their careers in custom print labs, working the trays. For us it was part of the profession.
The markets changed at the end of the 1990s. Color became cheaper and easier to produce and to reproduce. Clients moved into fully color mindsets pretty quickly and the darkroom became a refuge from work. A place where I could print my own stuff on my own schedule.
When I closed the 3,000 square foot studio and moved my office into a smaller building adjacent to my home I closed the door on the darkroom and around the same time made some big investments in digital cameras and related technology. While my peers were drawing lines in the sand and making statements about how they'd never give up film I sold off the film gear and spent a fortune on big Kodak digital cameras, grappling with $12,000 budgets per camera (you'll have to do the math for inflation).
I never gave up personal shooting with black and white in mind and even when I shoot a Leica in color I'm doing it in a .DNG format and in the back of my mind is the constant thought of "how will this look if I convert to black and white?"
When I went on vacation at the end of September this year I went with my spouse to Chicago. We had a great time. Friendly people, no stress, no conflicts. I took two cameras and shot mostly in raw. When I got back home I tossed the files into Lightroom and worked towards making the color in the images pop. I posted some here on the blog and also on Instagram. And then I left the files to ripen for the last couple of weeks.
This afternoon I sat down and started exploring how selected street images might look if I reworked them into black and white. And that's what this post is all about.
The two cameras were both Leicas. I wanted to see which of the two I'll want to use more in the future; the Q2 or the smaller DLUX-8. And part of that assessment is looking at finished files from each camera and seeing what works, what doesn't and what is similar across both cameras. But also, how they'll look when I convert their files to black and white.
I find some photographers put in way too much time making things like black and white conversions way too complicated and unnecessarily painful. It doesn't need to be that way. In fact, I found a preset that comes with the current edition of Lightroom Classic that was a good starting point for nearly every file here.
So, I set aside a few hours this afternoon and cherry-picked the files that I liked and toyed around with them. Since I don't write about theory much I am showing a lot of images which should serve as proof of procedure. If an image took more than five minutes of cajoling I abandoned it and searched for lower hanging fruit.
While I like diving into files that have been freshly shot I've spent time this year going back to big, square negatives I shot 30 and 40 years ago, scanning them and making them into black and white files as well as some larger (24x24 inch) black and white prints. Kind of the same way in which I'm approaching these Chicago files. I let them sit for a while after the initial color foray and now I've come back to them to see how they look in "monochrome."
The raw files from the Q2 are marginally better but the DLUX8 is a much more solid camera than a lot of people give it credit for. Especially if you consider it to be a "raw-only" device. The Jpegs are solid but the raw files are better.
Take a peek. Blow them up if you want to. None of these are for clients. I got rid of the clients last week. These were just for me.
Washers of tall windows.
temporary crosswalk companion.
Travel companion waiting for food and drink.
Leica photographer met in the street.
Johann Buis. Standing in front of Central Camera.
B. takes photos in her inimitable way.
The "Bean."
the plastic women at Macy's department store.
Street photography, or one way of looking at it.
"Crossing the street" photography.
Early morning in black and white.
Chicago River Walk.
Hanging out under the "Bean".
Testing the DLUX-8 flare at the "Bean".
Stairs to the third floor at the Cultural Center.
A hallway into the contemporary galleries at the Art Institute.
Gallery fuel.
Taking a break in the late afternoon before heading out for dinner.
The thoughtful pose and expression of an art director.
The furrowed brow and scrunched eye of an Austin photographer in Chicago.
Engagement photos right in the middle of the main stairway at the Art Institute.
Amazed that they allowed this commercial adventure on a crowded Saturday...
Bean-ography.
Heading down Wabash to somewhere...
I enjoyed sharing these images. Some were "one click" conversions via a Lightroom preset. Others were adjusted to taste. All were taken over the course of a couple of days. The rest of the time was spent going from museum to museum and front gallery to more galleries. Now home and having fun exploring the possibilities.
