In the course of editing the photos for the post on Island Cemetery I did what I always do with my photos - I converted them to black & white. Adobe Photoshop™ has some really excellent tools for such conversion, and I've gotten fairly good at producing usable b&w versions of my color shots. And before anybody starts making rude noises about digital manipulation and using words like "not authentic" and "tampering" and such, let me ask you something: In the old days of film photography, did you ever actually develop film in a darkroom? Because this is exactly what I do in Photoshop™; I'm developing a picture from a digital "negative", putting it through the digital equivalent of darkroom chemical processes. It's every bit as painstaking as working the old way, applying different processes or filters to get exactly the look I want in the final product. But as much as it's a lot of work, it's also great fun.
Sometimes, though, as much as I try, it doesn't always work. The bronze angel from Wednesday just wouldn't come out the way I wanted it to; the blue-green of the patina just wouldn't contrast itself with the stone no matter how I played around with the red/blue/green filters. It always ended up a uniform gray, and was boring to look at. And the wide shot of the chapel was just too dark, and lightening it up made the trees too bright, to make a good photo. But the chapel door shot above on the left turned out great. So did the Belmont monument and the Perry mausoleum shots below. Three out of five's not a bad result!
© 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger
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Comments: 10
Home color developing was not yet available when my dad and I used to take grayscale photos and develop the film, then print and enlarge. You're right, you could adjust contrast, correct poor lighting with dodging and burning, even alter some defects in a negative.
No apology needed.
In the case of your photo art, in my humble opinion what you do is legitimate and not "cheating".
Awesome work.