B&W Old School Photography

[ash]

Re: B&W Old School Photography

This last shot is a couple of otters, the otter on the left is obviously the female giving the male a hard time for going to the pub last night and stopping out late
And the male with his paw ' calm down love, it was only a few beers with the lads discussing angles and lead inn's for the shoot'

[Bob Ross]

Re: B&W Old School Photography

A Good set to finish off with Bob, and thanks for your input.
I have learnt alot the past week and feel in general we can all get bogged down with the vast majority of lenses available, all Im sure exeling in there specific job, but to just have 1 lens on the camera and make do, makes you think about the scene alot more and I think the outcome of the image straight from the camera is better.
The b&w in camera and not altering anything on the computer kinda ties in to the 1 lens thing and thought it was a good challenge for anyone taking part, I myself have got into the habit of thinking I can improve an image if I need to before ive even taken it! Which to me should not be the case and is bad practice.
Im a bit dissapointed there were not more forum regulers posting pics.
I never like good things to end so I hope you can all feel you can post pics to this thread whenever you wish and give a brief discription and hopefully no post processing!

I will be posting pics regularly aslong as the forum will let me, of b&w images with my d200 and my 50mm lens with no tweeks, it won't be everyday but when I can.
If you have followed this thread upto now then thankyou!
cheers
Ash.

Hi Ash,
This has been a good challenge to what should be established reflexes. A lot of learning for me was in the images not posted here Coupled with the basic challenge, I took looking for "good light" that suited the way I had set the camera up as a second challenge. That might explain some of the mundane subject matter in my samples. One of the things that I found was that measuring the exposure range of a scene and setting the contrast accordingly is still part of proper metering. Using on camera & lens helps the learning process, otherwise you learn how the cameras differ. Lots of parallels to the olden days of film.
I keep my B&W settings in a user memory, so I'll contribute from time to time.
Bob

[Rodbender]

Re: B&W Old School Photography

Thanks Rod, a very striking scene of very old and old in the same shot, Im not sure how much you adeared to the brief, but thanks very much for your input.
Ash.

[Stephen]

Re: B&W Old School Photography

Im a bit dissapointed there were not more forum regulers posting pics.
I never like good things to end so I hope you can all feel you can post pics to this thread whenever you wish and give a brief discription and hopefully no post processing!

cheers
Ash.

I'm afraid I hold my hands up and admit I never contributed to this thread. Why, well I'm afraid I couldn't agree from the outset with the criteria and even the principle of thread

You say in your first post

I love b&w and and grainyness and ruffness of old style photography, so Im going to fit my 50mm lens on my d200, set it to b&w only and crank up the iso, and see what happens

You then go on to say later about it all being done in camera and without Photoshop

I like B/W as much as you Ash, but I always shoot in Raw, and prefer to process my own shots, not let the camera decide. If I feel an image would work in mono then I will process it as such. If I want a gritty grainy feel, I can add that. I see this as all part of the creative process.

It just seems to me that you are wanting to emulate the B/W images you see created in the days when film was king, and ISO 1600 gave really gritty results. I've been there and done that and I can tell you that with todays modern dSLRs, even set to 1600, you can't achieve anywhere near the same result as you could with film. Cranking up the ISO and shooting in B/W on your D200 is not going to achieve what you are after.

However, shoot away without those limitations, and then create the effect you are after in the software, seems much better way IMHO.

I don't deny there are some lovely images in this thread, but most are not achieving what you really set out to do I feel. Even Bob Ross is in some ways bending the rules by making in camera adjustments, over and above aperture and shutter speed, something that couldn't be done with a film camera. Letting the camera decide on the result you show is no way as good as creating the end result in a Raw processor like Lightroom or in Photoshop (or similar).

Without going on anymore then, whilst your challenge was a good idea in so far as you wanted to recreate the look of 'old school' images, for me I didn't really agree with your criteria for what you were trying to achieve, so I felt I could not contribute.

[Bob Ross]

Re: B&W Old School Photography

I'm afraid I hold my hands up and admit I never contributed to this thread. Why, well I'm afraid I couldn't agree from the outset with the criteria and even the principle of thread

You say in your first post
You then go on to say later about it all being done in camera and without Photoshop

I like B/W as much as you Ash, but I always shoot in Raw, and prefer to process my own shots, not let the camera decide. If I feel an image would work in mono then I will process it as such. If I want a gritty grainy feel, I can add that. I see this as all part of the creative process.

It just seems to me that you are wanting to emulate the B/W images you see created in the days when film was king, and ISO 1600 gave really gritty results. I've been there and done that and I can tell you that with todays modern dSLRs, even set to 1600, you can't achieve anywhere near the same result as you could with film. Cranking up the ISO and shooting in B/W on your D200 is not going to achieve what you are after.

However, shoot away without those limitations, and then create the effect you are after in the software, seems much better way IMHO.

I don't deny there are some lovely images in this thread, but most are not achieving what you really set out to do I feel. Even Bob Ross is in some ways bending the rules by making in camera adjustments, over and above aperture and shutter speed, something that couldn't be done with a film camera. Letting the camera decide on the result you show is no way as good as creating the end result in a Raw processor like Lightroom or in Photoshop (or similar).

Without going on anymore then, whilst your challenge was a good idea in so far as you wanted to recreate the look of 'old school' images, for me I didn't really agree with your criteria for what you were trying to achieve, so I felt I could not contribute.

Hi Stephen,
When we shot film and developed it, we had to make some choices before the actaual exposure and it honed some skills, that today don't have to be used, or do they? We chose the film and were stuck with it. My configuring the camera is to me "choosing the film" and choosing "in camera JPEG" is choosing the developer/time/temperature. Now, film was a limited medium and those that bent it were those that shot sheet film and developed each exposure uniquely and then made prints with lots of manipulations. Since the picture wasn't seen until it was "too late", skills were needed in pre-visualization.
I took Ash's challenge as a way to revisit that pre-exposure discipline. It isn't a case of letting the camera decide, but one of making the photographer decide before the exposure. Digital moves some of the darkroom tasks to the camera like choice of contrast. We used to do that with paper grades, but where is the paper nowadays?
Learning pre-exposure skills is part of the craft and, to me, is very useful when it comes to PPing. I am a compulsive post processor in real life. Ash's challenge is like going to a PPA meeting
In my years with rangefinders, learning the lenses was important. To know what the capture field was before you brought the camera to eye, meant that the camera didn't interfere with "seeing". That skill has dissapeared with the zoom & live view generation. So, the question is whether pre-exposure skills are still valuable or should we just say, " I shoot RAW only, who cares"?
Bob

[Rodbender]

Re: B&W Old School Photography

Hi Stephen,
When we shot film and developed it, we had to make some choices before the actaual exposure and it honed some skills, that today don't have to be used, or do they? We chose the film and were stuck with it. My configuring the camera is to me "choosing the film" and choosing "in camera JPEG" is choosing the developer/time/temperature. Now, film was a limited medium and those that bent it were those that shot sheet film and developed each exposure uniquely and then made prints with lots of manipulations. Since the picture wasn't seen until it was "too late", skills were needed in pre-visualization.
I took Ash's challenge as a way to revisit that pre-exposure discipline. It isn't a case of letting the camera decide, but one of making the photographer decide before the exposure. Digital moves some of the darkroom tasks to the camera like choice of contrast. We used to do that with paper grades, but where is the paper nowadays?
Learning pre-exposure skills is part of the craft and, to me, is very useful when it comes to PPing. I am a compulsive post processor in real life. Ash's challenge is like going to a PPA meeting
In my years with rangefinders, learning the lenses was important. To know what the capture field was before you brought the camera to eye, meant that the camera didn't interfere with "seeing". That skill has dissapeared with the zoom & live view generation. So, the question is whether pre-exposure skills are still valuable or should we just say, " I shoot RAW only, who cares"?
Bob

You have raised some good points there Bob, but only us older photographers will appreciate them. It's so long ago that I used film that I had almost forgoten it. Things have certainly changed now that digital has arrived. Like you say having chosen your film you were stuck with it unless you had the luxury of interchangeable backs. Even then the choices were some what limited. We did, more or less, do the same in the darkroom as some do today on their computers. Manipulating the end result etc. How much easier it all seems now with software like photoshop. I gave up photography for a number of years and have only in the last few years come back to it. Video was my main interest for quite some time, now I've got bored with that. Coming back into digital photography has been quite refreshing. Not sure if we should be comparing digital with film. I'm treating digital as a whole new hobby.

[Bob Ross]

Re: B&W Old School Photography

Hi Rod,
I agree that the "film vr digital" subject is a subjective trap, though there are some areas like exposure metering, that are the same and there are certain image qualities from film that haven't quite made the medium transition. This last point can sometimes be meat for post processing. One area that I mentioned was the color/gray scale conversion (JPEG) and I have a shot not posted from the FX500 where all the greens just run into each other and definition goes away. Another area that I have been playing with in color is the way digital doesn't seem to build up the color density the way that slide film did and generic global saturation tools just don't quite mimic it properly. Subtle stuff, known to old timers, but it can make a difference.
Bob

[ash]

Re: B&W Old School Photography

Sorry if my title mislead you Stephen, maybe I should have called it ' Photography with a digital camera with 1 lens and set on in camera b&w and no post processing'
Earlier in the thread you did give the impression you where going to share some pictures, to which I replied 'by all means post some shots', I would have been very happy to see some of your pictures, as I always love looking at your work.
Its unfortunate you felt you could not contribute.
This was in no way a serious scientific experiment to compare old film with digital, which you are trying to make out it was, it was a bit of fun to see what results could be obtained from one lens, in camera b&w and no post processing, and I invited forum members to take part, if you could not manage that criteria to take some shots then thats fine.
Ive read your response over, and feel on the whole you have seen it as a much more serious experiment than it actually was, its certainly something ive enjoyed doing, and Im glad that other forum members joined in and understood where I was coming from.
cheers
Ash.