Deve’s Blog

I’ve never been a big fan of black and white. After all, the world is in color… I like colors. Indeed, when I’m touching up my pictures I usually push on saturation and contrast, sometimes even a bit too much, so that the blues, oranges and reds pop out…
Still, I have to admit that some pictures can look good even in black and white; furthermore, I’ve always been intrigued by the technique that leaves some colored elements on black and white pictures or movies (as in Schindler’s List or Sin City).
So, even if I’m still a fan of color pictures, I decided to make some attempts of black and white conversions, mostly to practice a bit with the various techniques. Here’s the small (so far) photo set.

First of all, when using digital cameras you’re better off shooting in color rather than using the dedicated “black and white” settings. That’s because when using those settings, the camera is simply doing what you’d be doing later on Photoshop, but without giving us any kind of control on it (or at least, with a much reduced control and without the chance to “undo” and try a different setting).
The two methods I used in Photoshop, which offer a different kind of control but good results in both cases, are the Channel Mixer and the Image Calculations, following the tips found in this article.

As regards the touches of color on black and white, this post shows the two main methods; a third way I’d like to point out is the simple use of the Quick Selection Tool or the Magic Wand, if the object you want to keep colored is good for that kind of selections. You can also use the History Brush, which is more immediate to use but IMHO harder to correct in case of mistakes; anyway, conceptually it’s the same thing as the standard brush usage described in the first post.
In any case, the basic concept is simple: once you have the black and white image, put it in a layer on top of the color one, and with the chosen method (brush, color range, selection) create a mask to “filter” the color so it gets visible. That’s it!

UPDATE: looking around a bit more, I found this post which lists 12 different ways to go black and white… the most interesting are the first one (probably the most complete but also the most time-consuming) and the dedicated Black and White Adjustment in Photoshop CS3.

Last Sunday, during the morning, I went outside for a walk to the “usual” landmarks of Milan, to test my new Nikkor 10-24 lens…
But I think I need to take a step back, as I haven’t yet dedicated a post on the blog to my Nikon D90 reflex, which I bought around a year ago…

Before digital cameras came around, I didn’t use cameras much… and come on, with films and their limited shots, and the time it took to develop the film and realize which photos came out nice and which didn’t (when it was too late already), they weren’t very friendly…
Moving to the digital era, I became a user of Casio’s Exilm cameras, from the simple zoomless S3 (but it was very small and thin for those times), to the excellent Z-750, on to the curious EX-V7 (7x internal zoom, at the expense of image quality, which was a bit lower than the 750). What I always loved about Exilims, which for other aspects were actually worse than their competitors, was the possibility to use them in full manual mode. After taking a few shots I was indeed getting intrigued about techniques like long exposures for night shots, or playing around with depth of field, so manual control was needed.

Still, what those little cameras could do was still limited, and after seeing some travel companions with their DSLRs (in Canada, Peru, Cuba…), after some careful researching, as I desired a greater control on pictures and a better quality especially for night shots, I went for the buy, in time for a field test in China.
At first I was interested in the Canon 500D, but I ended up going on the Nikon D90, which I preferred mainly because of the better quality in high ISO pictures (ironically, that’s due to the fact that the 500D has more megapixels than the D90, which is probably too much for the size of the sensor…), and because the D90 is a little step up in terms of functionalities.

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Well, it’s really been ages since I posted a panography… and so now I’m posting two!
There two panos have been in the drawer for a year, as they were shot during my trip to Canada; last weekend, despite not being able to post the usual “diary” of the corresponding parts of the trip, I managed to upload a good amount of pictures (check out the Jasper and Icefields Parkway sets, it’s really worth it).
And in the meantime I had some time to create these two panographies, quite simple after all.
The first one is a shot of the marvellous Peyto Lake. The pano itself is nothing special, and it’s made up of a little more than a dozen pics, but the subject is so beatiful that I couldn’t but shoot at least a mini-panography.

The second one is a bit more complex, and it’s Downtown Manhattan as seen from the Brookyln Bridge. It came out pretty nice, although it’s not one of the most exciting panographies. And as I pointed out some time ago, the absence of the Twin Towers from New York’s skyline is really “noisy”…

Well, that’s it for today…

Here I am with a new panography… not completely new actually, as it’s still the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, which I had already attempted to shoot without success some time ago.
I decided to try it again in a sunny day, but I also tried a new experiment: after the 360° panography, a panography with a vertical component…

As I was starting to compose it, I thought: “as it’s certainly going to be the toughest panography I try, it would be nice to somehow document the various steps of the process…”. As I didn’t want to do those stop-motion style movies (several pics shots at a long time interval and put into a sequence) (and anyway this kind of work is not good for that kind of movie because there’s a lot of zooming and moving involved), I just got some screenshots… so here’s the tale of how this pano, which you can see completed at the end of the post, was born.

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I did it, just as I had anticipated I worked on the 360° panography of Piazza Maggiore… well, I think the result is not bad at all. Not having used the zoom caused a lot of inconsistencies between pics, so I arranged them “cubist-like”, trying to keep the centre of the buildings as coherent as possible, and adapting roofs and floors. For San Petronio I had used the zoom, so I reduced the size of those images accordingly and it worked without great problems. But it’s not a great technique… the ideal always seems to be to use the same, maximum zoom.
Finally I repeated 4 pics on the two sides, near the Nettuno, to “close the circle”. Yes, definitely ok as an experiment… I guess a 360 pano with a fixed 3x zoom (which also means a lot more photos) would turn out even better…

Original size here (look out, it’s pretty big), photopage there.

Yeah, it’s been quite a long time, but finally here are the two panographies from Athens… the main course is obviously the Parthenon, which I think came out nice. I like the perspective effect, going to the right the columns “bend” because the roof and the ceiling get farther from each other… the base of the temple is also nice, with grass and stones, and the unusual shape of the composition is pretty cool. Luckily there were no holes, and no problems were caused by having to move from the initial shooting position because of an annoying site watcher, who decided I could no longer sit on the big stone from which I had been shooting for ten minutes… so I took the last photos while standing and bending, trying to get in the same spot, but those last pics came out totally different… luckily I didn’t need to use them because I already had everything I needed. Original size here, photo page there.

The second pano is not as good, it’s the Kallimármaro stadium. I shot this one with no zoom if I can remember correctly, ’cause I didn’t want to shoot for fifteen minutes, and this really had an impact: I couldn’t even find a pair of pics which overlap correctly. So I arranged them in a cubist style. And I’m beginning to appreciate these imprecisions and wrong overlapping. So, it’s not a great thing, but it’s decent. Original size here, photo page there.

The next one I’ll work on is a panography of Piazza Maggiore, in Bologna, which I shot when I went there for the Coppa Italia; I shot it 360°, and changing the zoom between the shots (for example I used full zoom on San Petronio and on the Nettuno, taking several pics, but no zoom for the surrounding buildings, taking less photos). Maybe nothing will come out of it, or it will turn out awesome, I’ll try and let you know…

I’ll start with a panography: this is what we saw from the balcony of our apartment, with several sunny mountains on the background (which have nothing to do with the places where we skied, which were on the other side of the residence). Original size here and photo page there.

But let’s talk a bit about Risoul (only after pointing out the photo set on Flickr which is here. Oh, no geotagging, the map around Risoul is not accurate enough…)… a trip which started with a number of mishaps, but then everything went fine…

December 30th, pullman number 3, on which both me and my friends from Bologna are travelling, should leave from Bologna at 8.30 in the morning, getting in Milan around 11 to load up some guys including me. First little problem, the pullman left Bologna at 9.30… It seems it began its trip in Rimini, at 6: on this subject, a very interesting testimony by a guy on the bus: “we’re from Cesena, they told us to be in Rimini at 6, we woke up at 5 to be there, we took the pullman from Rimini, then we realized the bus went to Cesena and stopped basically in front of my house…”. Pleasant!

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Not as good as the Red Square, but here’s the last two. First St. Basil, nothing special but still came out nice. Moreover, being quite compact, it came out as a square rather than some weirder shape; here, too, a pity about the weather…

Then, the Cosmonaut’s Monument, nearby the Fair… few shots, just to do it, but it has some dignity anyway. Later I found out it’s not just a straight thing pointing in the air, but it’s like a ramp (you’ll see this better when I’ll put up the photos… I’ll do it, trust me, I’ll do it… in the meantime check out this photo on Flickr), so any other point of view would have been more interesting, either on the side showing the ramp, or on the back where the concavity is)… oh well, we had to run to the MIIF :asd:… too bad…

As usual, original size here and here, photo pages there and there.

Here’s to you the Red Square in all its (grey) beauty… St. Basilius and the Parthenon will follow, hopefully in reasonable times…
The Flickr page to see the image in full size (definitely suggested) is here, while the photo page for comments and stuff is here.

Here’s the last venetian panography (click to zoom, original here, photo page there), I finally decided to do it. This one is definitely messed up, there was no way I could overlap everything perfectly because I shot from very near and the perspective definitely had an effect. So I aligned the upper part and tried to artistically place the lower one… it’s not bad after all. The only problem was the central part, under the big window… I missed a piece there, so I “cheated” by copying there another piece and deforming it a bit… come one, it’s just one pic out of 83!!