| EXIF: | | Aperture Priority, Pattern Metering, EV +1 2/3, 1/500 sec, F/5.6, ISO-800, 55 mm (88 mm equivalent) | | Camera/Lens: | | Canon EOS 350D Digital Rebel XT, Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 | | Location: | | Johns Hopkins University campus, Baltimore, MD | | Notes: | | This is a reprocessing of this photo from last year. One thing that bugged me about the color version of this picture is that the water was green, and not in an on-purpose-St. Patrick's Day kind of way, and not in a lovely fresh springs kind of water. Maybe the green is just from algae growing on the stone, but I think it's rather putrid. So I thought I would try black and white and I really do like it a lot better. I think my attention isn't drawn to the scary nuclear water, but to the crisp water frozen in motion as it flows over the lip of the fountain.
To those who are interested, I converted this to black and white within Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). Usually I wait until I bring the photo into Photoshop proper and then use the channel mixer, but occasionally I just desaturate in ACR and then play around with the base color for different contrast. (I think this is akin to throwing a bunch of color filters on the camera and choosing films with different color temperatures and curves, but film fanatics should feel free to correct me.) For this photo, I boosted the color temperature to 8600 with a -42 tint, because I'd overexposed this in camera, I had to reduce the exposure by -2/3 stops, set the shadows to 20 and reduce the brightness to 30. I then set the contrast to +100, and changed the color calibration as follows: Shadow Tint +100, Red Hue +100, Blue Saturation -100. (I'm sure that these numbers don't mean much to most people, but to those who play with ACR, you can probably imagine that the color version of this photo looks really bizarre - the water is even more putrid than before and the whole image has a horrible green/yellow cast.) |
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