My current favorite modern art gallery: West Chelsea Contemporary. In Austin.
I figured I could sit around on the couch and watch all the old Star Wars movies again or I could ignore the fading side effects of my two vaccines from yesterday and get back to normal stuff. I chose the normal stuff. I've been having a renewed love affair with the Leica CL so I decided to take one of the pair downtown along with the tiny Sigma 18-50mm f2.8 Contemporary lens. It's the one that only covers APS-C. Almost a perfect match for the CL except for a little bit of vignetting... Not much. Just enough so that I find myself correcting it if there's a lot of "sky" in the photographs...
The gallery is across the street from my usual parking place so it makes for a nice transitional launchpad into a good, downtown walk. The gallery leans strongly toward graffiti inflected works and that's just fine with me although they do toss in a statue of Kip's Big Boy every once in a while; just for fun.
Michael Johnston can be a powerful, subliminal influencer and ever since he embarked on his quest for "purity" in black and white digital imaging I've been trying more and more often to do my own tests and my own work with "monochrome" in mind. I'm not willing to go as far as MJ and mutilate a sensor in order to make it permanently into a black and white camera but I am constantly trying new processing formulas and camera settings to see what I can get. The "Butterfly" bridge that connects downtown to downtown is a willing and patient subject. It's twice as nice now that both sides of the pedestrian sidewalks are now open.
The lure to black and white seems strong for some in my generation and I think it's pretty obvious that this is because most of us learned the craft by shooting (then) less expensive black and white film and learning to do our own processing and printing in black and white darkrooms. I know that I have an affection for black and white even when I presume that many photographs look better in color, or have their reason to exist based in colors and hues.
It seems obvious that black and white works best for very graphic subjects but lately I see it pressed into service in many of the niches that perhaps should be left to color. Almost as if, in the rush to make everything black and white we end up with "missing pieces."
Plenty of good image making power in a small and light system. A nice change from the bigger cameras.
8 comments:
I realize the topic is black and white, but the color shots at the top are just too great to overlook. Especially the first and last. You’ve written that almost any current digital camera can be tweaked to produce the same image as any other. Would that apply to the color and clarity of the Leica photos you’ve been producing? If so, would you share the settings formula needed to turn a Panasonic G9 into a Leica CL?
Hi MM, When I saw almost any digital camera can be tweaked to produce the same color I guess I'm referring to making a Canon image into a Sony image or a Nikon image, etc. I think the Leica designers take a wholly different approach to color by emphasizing not super low noise or super wide DR but by emphasizing a different metric some call color differentiation. An ever more granular distinct between colors that's more realistic to me.
All sensor output is based on three or four metrics and it's like the old auto shop posters: Choose any two. Sony, Nikon, et al, seem to choose speed, low noise and DR but, I think, perhaps at the cost of color discrimination.
On the other hand, I'm not a color science guru so I could be talking pure B.S. I do know that I've probably used and shot more frames from more different cameras than anyone but a YouTube reviewer and I've seen first hand the differences and how they manifest in the final images. Want low noise? Get a Nikon. Want wide DR? Get a Sony. Want a finer approach to subtle and realistic color? Get a Leica or a Sigma fp.
The color from my Panasonic G9 seems great to me. A smaller sensor but still really nice color. The only thing I routinely do with my G9 files in post is to reduce the saturation a bit and add more midrange contrast. That seems to clean up everything and give me good files. Also, when shooting portrait i tend to go into the HSL menu in PS and go to the red hue control. I shift it four to six points toward yellow. Calms down the red tones in most faces.
Hope this is somehow helpful. KT
Should read: "When I say...." instead of "When I saw...." Damn that autocorrect.
Hadn't noticed the vignetting with Leica CL and Sigma 18-50 lens. Since a fair portion of my photos do have lots of sky, I'll have to look a little harder now or perhaps my Capture 1 software auto corrects before I see it.
Thanks, Kirk. Each time I view one of your outings with the CL I see a touch of Kodachrome, only better. I’m not familiar with the Fuji films of that era so my reference may be off the mark. It’s basically a film transparency look with rich color, strong but not overpowering contrast, and acutance I would normally ascribe to the lens. And no, I don’t mean slight the photographer as part of the equation. In this case the photographer is the constant, camera bodies and lenses the variables.
As an avid B&W photographer from the "film era" I have struggled to find digital B&W images that satisfy me. I was an early convert to both the Adams and Weston Zone systems and found great satisfaction in printing on glossy polycontrast paper dried on glossy drum dryers.
Somehow I have not found the same satisfaction from digital B&W. I just cannot see the same richness of tonalities in either prints (perhaps because they are usually on matte baryta paper) nor displays (and I have used the best calibrated displays available).
I should add that I feel somewhat the same way about colour images in that I cannot find the digital printed equivalent of a well executed dye-transfer print. However, before I sound like the old geyser that I am, I much prefer colour digital images on a good calibrated monitor to anything printed on paper.
Perhaps someone here can tell me what am I missing or doing wrong in B&W.
I personally, am on a quest to find a fuji simulation, that meets the midtone richness , and highlight delicateness of tri x shot at 200, and developed in hc110 ( a la Fred Picker)........any hints?
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