Mentor Group project --
When I was photographing monarch butterflies today at the big field, I had our mentoring group in mind. I would normally only imagine the final product as a color photo (see original photo here: http://365project.org/taffy/special-photos/2014-08-01). Today, I paid more attention to capturing the butterfly in a way that would lend itself to a structural emphasis through b&w. Here's the result...what do you think? (365 friends -- don't feel obligated to comment about this -- my mentor group is working on b&w and this is assignment 1 for us).
It's love too but I think I prefer the colour, the leaf behind the butterfly is pulling my attention to it rather than the subject. Hope you don't mind my critique Taffy.
This is such a lovely photo of the monarch butterfly. In the colour shot, my eye is immediately drawn to the butterfly and the bright colours on it. For the b&w, my eye goes to the texture and patterns on the plant it is sitting on, and the light leaves behind. I feel like the butterfly is a little lost in the b&w.
I like this better. Perhaps that's because I'm personally not that fussed by macro insect/flower shots. I know tremendous skill goes into capturing them well....and patience... perhaps I just lack the patience. So for me the colour one is another well taken butterfly shot and I just see a butterfly. This one though I see detail, I see fragility of the butterfly's wings, his legs and the way they bend, I stop and look and see that his body is spotty. I look at the way he is walking on the flower. For me this in b and w makes me stop and look rather than just presume I know what it is. That make sense at all? I think its very beautiful like this.
This makes a great B&W image Taffy but I am distracted by the busy background which I did not notice at all in the colour version. The details of the butterfly are very clear in this version.
Taffy, I'm not sure that my commenting here is appropriate at all. In my opinion the leaf behind the butterfly came out to white in your processing and distracts from the beautiful butterfly. Any ideas about how you could change that?
@ericdibosco Totally appropriate to comment any time! I hadn't noticed how white the leaf looked in b&w, and tried to fix it with picmonkey -- not successful. In the original, since I don't know how to use layering (yet), my attempts to darken it were pretty clumsy. Too bad as otherwise, I really liked the way the wings looked in this version. I think I may crop it in picmonkey to see if that helps.
@ericdibosco For b&w, it's Nik Silver Efex. For color, mostly it's Aperture and Color Efex, with a few Topaz Fusion (or something like that). I have perfect layers 8, but don't know how to use it yet. And, I have access to LR and PS through the university for a yearly rate of $10.00. No excuse for me using such limited set, but it's a lack of time to learn new tools at the moment. Any thoughts?
@taffy I don't know any of the programs that you regularly use, but I assume that they mainly have pre-sets to apply to the image without much input or opportunity for manipulation by yourself, which is why I do my conversions in PSE or Lightroom by changing the image to B&W and then adjusting the various colour components (in Lightroom) or creating a hue-layer (in PSE) and adjusting the hue and saturation, after which I adjust the overall light balance and contrast. This really gives so much more control over individual aspects, like the lighter green leaf in this picture. By the way, I did not actually answer your question about the crop and darkening of the leaf: the darkening worked quite good, nut I preferred the initial composition: the butterfly seems to be squeezed in too tightly here. But you shouldn't really follow my suggestions here: you should also consult with experts in B&W like Mara @mara19500 (numero uno in high contrast journalistic images), Sally @salsa and Angela @angelat (who has just completed an excellent month of B&W).
@ericdibosco Hi Eric @ericdibosco ! Hi Taffy @taffy ! Thanks for mentioning me in your discussion.
I'm terribly sorry I'm missing the whole month of July but as I wrote to Vikki @summerfield I had technology issues with both my Mac and my hard disk (where I had stored all my pictures - including the Canada ones, after deleting the photos from the memory cards): the hard disk fell down while in use and did not work any more.
That partially explains my absence - I have finally recovered everything and have a HUGE amount of work ahead of me. BUT, I'm leaving on Sunday on a 10-day photo tour to Saint Petersburg, Russia, with my teacher - the photog pro - and other students and will be heaping up more and more work. Help!!!! I don't know when I will ever be able to catch up with all that.
Miss you guys, miss 365 and for the first time my album is a huge blank hole!!!! Shame on me!
I love this shot and done in B&W makes it amazing. I shot mostly B&W in my high school class. It is really interesting what can be detailed this way. The shades of gray come out too. I am going to read what you have been up to with this group above. Was thinking of pulling some of my older photos and transitioning them to B&W or something creative. FAV
@darsphotos Thanks for the fav, Darlene! Our little mentoring group is trying to unpack how b&w works a bit -- looking last week at comparing a color to a b&w to see what's gained/lost and then this week looking at different types of contrasts.
@taffy You are very welcome. What a fun group. B&W is amazing. I still have B&W photos from back in the day. I loved the trees at Golden Gate Park in SF as they showed so many gray tones, surprisingly to me. Guess the shades of green and lighting made them look like that. Wish I had that photo somewhere handy and hope to find it among all my paper photos. So nice of you to do this for this group. I used to go to a photo lab in SF with my color negatives and change them to B&W as I would shoot color on occasion too. Memories coming back and having fun trying new things. Payed with my squirrel photo tonight but it did not come out very good.
These are stunning creatures in color but I like this a lot! I like how the "dots" on the body kind of blend with the spots on the wings. I'm surprised I like this image as much as I do! FAV
August 21st, 2014
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I'm terribly sorry I'm missing the whole month of July but as I wrote to Vikki @summerfield I had technology issues with both my Mac and my hard disk (where I had stored all my pictures - including the Canada ones, after deleting the photos from the memory cards): the hard disk fell down while in use and did not work any more.
That partially explains my absence - I have finally recovered everything and have a HUGE amount of work ahead of me. BUT, I'm leaving on Sunday on a 10-day photo tour to Saint Petersburg, Russia, with my teacher - the photog pro - and other students and will be heaping up more and more work. Help!!!! I don't know when I will ever be able to catch up with all that.
Miss you guys, miss 365 and for the first time my album is a huge blank hole!!!! Shame on me!