Black and white printing

3dogs

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A beautiful picture for a remembrance of your daughter! The cropping was perfect and the B/W print is a wonderful enhancement. You caught her looking directly into the camera, and this view accentuates the sense of connection between the photographer and subject. With her sweet, unforced smile she belies the medical issues she is facing. The close crop of the face and conversion to B/W takes away the distraction of the whole scene and of color, and it brings to the viewer an intimate sense of the person.

As a stranger, when I first looked at her picture, I immediately knew I liked her. With the click of a camera shutter you truly brought her lovely persona to us and to anyone else who views this picture.

Beautiful words @fotofreek you have put into a few words what most of us would have felt and would have liked to to be able to say.

Thanks
 

Harry Briels

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Thanks to all of you for your warm and nice words!
I am happy that a.o. because of your advises of how to print B&W, I now have a nice photo of our daughter!
It is for me a strange experience to "discover" how beautiful a B&W image really can be.
I never tried because I thought that one needs color because the world around us is full of color.
But there is some kind of mystic in a B&W photo?
Harry
 

Ink stained Fingers

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It is for me a strange experience to "discover" how beautiful a B&W image really can be.
When you take an image you are either intentionally reducing very much the total view of that world around you, you frame the image, use a particular focal length, a particular aperture to work with sharper and not so sharp areas, you are unintionally reducing very many more details of the scene as you look to it - you just take a 2D image of a 3D scene, and the same applies the the colors, you record some of the colors, within the visual spectrum, you are not recording the UV part or the infrared part of the scene. You are taking an image, you are not taking a movie scene, so there is not so much mystic with it, you are reducing intentionally , or unintentionally, the image of the scene as you are taking it, or later in postprocessing , to what you think are the essentials of that image, and that could be the colors, or not, that can be outlines , shapes and dimensions , that can be a particular lighting situation - contrast regardless of the color etc. So removing colors is just one of several of such reductions you did already - 2D instead of 3D, one image instead of a movie clip so movements are gone, and with taking away the colors, converting them into gray shades you enhance that image contents which you consider most important. You could go a step further and reduce the gray shades to black and white - that may work with some high contrast scenes, and not at all with most other images. It is overall a creative process you are doing - you put your view into the image, and reduce or eliminate the less important or distracting properties.
 

3dogs

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Anyone remember 1000 ASA Kodak film. Devil to process and grainy as all hell but made some mighty prints. It was also known as tone drop out film by some users.
 

The Hat

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To me personally, the huge difference between Colour and B&W photos are, with the colour one you only view the contents and admire the spectrum but with the B&W you view it, studied it and try to imagine the contents to get yourself more deeply involved with it.

There is so much more hidden in B&W that can if you want be retrieved with just pure emotion, that can let you enter the photo..
 

3dogs

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To me personally, the huge difference between Colour and B&W photos are, with the colour one you only view the contents and admire the spectrum but with the B&W you view it, studied it and try to imagine the contents to get yourself more deeply involved with it.

There is so much more hidden in B&W that can if you want be retrieved with just pure emotion, that can let you enter the photo..

Spot on, it cuts out the clutter and forces us to really connect with the image. I think there is something in our conditioning that is challenged and rewarded by having to use our imagination. It takes away the faithful reproduction and replaces it with suggestion.
Suggestion used wisely is a very powerful tool, hence my question related to the old Kodak 1000ASA it was a film used a lot by the Police to get images in very low light, and when used in 'normal' light gave effects that I had forgotten about till a couple of days ago when I was going through an old box of A4 prints. I must try to get that effect again with digital......its almost cartoon!
 

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