On Oct 14, 6:26 pm, Annika1980 wrote:
On Oct 14, 4:18 am, wrote:



I'm a bit
sick of hearing "you just can't do quality b&w with digital" - while I
agree that seems to be mostly true, I want to know *exactly why*...!!!

I don't agree with this at all.
It is very possible to get quality B&W from a digital capture.
So the question becomes, "Why can't you?"

Fair question. And I'll probably never be a good b&w imager - I just
don't readily see scenes in b&w... I tend to experiment with images I
have already taken, and (more by accident than design), 'discover'
those that look good (or at least better than they did in colour...)
in b&w.

But I don't often see striking b&w images that have been *captured* in
digital, and often my results have the boring 'look' that I got with a
recent SI submission:
http://www.pbase.com/shootin/image/86568468
or, say, from this portrait:
http://www.marktphoto.com/portrait/slides/lara_1.jpg
neither of which is quite what I wanted - plus with the first one I
ran into posterisation problems (granted, it was not shot raw..).

And I often hear comments about the difficulty in getting the quality
achieved from a good b&w film and them legendary platinum prints...
here are a few examples of the 'look' I mean - of course you could
(accurately) say these images are more about the image content and how
they were lit. But any tips on how to approach this sort of tonality
(for want of a better word) would be appreciated.

http://archives.imaginginfo.com/arti...6970_Lyson.jpg
http://a4.vox.com/6a00d10a7a1eb08bfa...c0b46a47-500pi
http://www.chroniclebooks.com/Chroni...8/coltrane.jpg
http://www.thespiderawards.com/image...ichele_009.jpg
http://lakarita.bravehost.com/Karita...ard_Avedon.jpg

Anwyay, I'm sure I've heard you say that b&w is mostly a waste of
time! Are you turning? (O: