Camera, lights, click the shutter, review photograph…. edit the photo….. Black and white photographs can be a final result.

I recently was on a field trip with the Casper Photography Association to Sheridan, Wyoming. Our first stop was King Ropes. Below are two color photos and their duplicates in black and white. My camera of choice that day was a Pentax 645D with a Pentax 45-85 zoom lens. The lighting was indoor, mainly dim overhead tungsten. I used a monopod to support the camera. After reviewing my results, I realized I should have used a tripod as the photos would have probably been sharper. The lighting was just too dim to keep the monopod still for a long enough time.

Photoshop was my software of choice to edit these photos but any editing software should work fine. I will not be going through each Photoshop step but will show you the first and then final photo. My purpose was to show that a person does not need to be satisfied with their first color rendition.

This is a color closeup of a saddle horn and the forks supporting it. It was a beautiful antique saddle but I failed to get the information about its history. I moved in close and used the zoom function of the lens to crop unwanted areas. I did not care for the color in this photograph after I made it. Black and white seemed a good option.

I think this photo was much better in black and white. Of course the minor adjustments I made in Photoshop added to the end result. Basically I cropped, sharpened, straightened, and then cloned in the black background.

Ropes hanging, priced to be sold, made an interesting exhibit but the color version just didn’t cut it for me. Instead of adjusting the color and trying to come up with a better image, I made it into black and white. Again, with some cropping and sharpening, but no cloning or straightening, black and white was my choice for this photo.

If you have the capability with whatever photo editing software you own (you don’t need Photoshop), try turning some of your photos into black and white. You might like the results.

Please check out some of my photography at http://sam-sherman.artistwebsites.com/. Here you will find some black and white photographs interspersed with color photographs.