Tag: monochrome

Colour and Black & White

A few images taken with the Canon G11, demonstrating how colour sometimes gets in the way of a good picture.

Last year’s leftovers.
Remove the colour and see only shape and texture.
Strange colour for a cement truck!
In monochrome the machine’s shape is emphasized.
Engines look good in full tones.
Still look good desaturated.
Boxcar graffiti.
Graffiti becomes less evident in gray shades.

You can decide for yourself which way looks better for each picture: I’m just demonstrating the possibilities to encourage people to try it. Only seconds are needed to desaturate a colour image – or switch it back.

The train was at a siding in Williams Lake on my most recent visit to that city.

One scene seen six ways

Manual images are fine, but sometimes need some post-processing to make them just right. Or maybe not.

The original. Underexposed, moody. Or is that ‘muddy’?
Automatic equalization applied in GIMP. Better exposure, odd colours.
Auto white balance correction applied in GIMP. Most people would say this is ‘right’.
Exposure corrected using brightness and contrast controls in GIMP. This is the most accurate to life.
Getting artistic: white balance correction with colours “toned down” by ‘fading’.
When all else fails try turning the colour off. Or even if the colour is good it doesn’t hurt to see what the monochrome version looks like.

This will be boring

Monday. -15F/-26C. Went for hearing test. No problem found. Nice, except it doesn’t deal with the tinnitus issue. I was kind of expecting this “null result”.

Tuesday. -30F/-34C. Not going to do anything. That lasted 15 minutes, until I had to go into town to get the neighbour’s grocery pick-up because their vehicle wouldn’t start. I was not expecting that.

Weather forecast says more of the same, maybe a little less brutal, for the next week. Egad.

Oh it’s too cold to take pictures, and not just because only a moron would take their gloves off in these temperatures. But here are some “leftovers” to look at.

Somebody is going Jeeping.
Snowflakes, the hard way.
Snowflakes, the hard way.
Snowflakes the easy way.
Flock away!
Ice cold moon.

Still no lens adapter, after more than a month. Apparently after it was handed over to Canada Post, they lost it. Or else it was stolen by a gang of International Lens Adapter Thieves. After all, it’s worth almost $10.

We still have no vaccine either. That’s worth a lot more, it seems.

Always darkest

We’ve actually been picking up minutes of daylight now that the Earth is moving away from the Winter Solstice. You’re forgiven if you haven noticed. Around here it’s a tad hard to, what with the clouds and the mountains. Our sunrise is actually 45 minutes after the official time and sunset about half an hour before, thanks to the topography.

Anyway, some more shots done with the G11. In B&W. Not shot in B&W, as I tried that and didn’t like it. Most digital cameras don’t do a good job in monochrome.

This is not a nighttime camera.
Ice is everywhere.
Really everywhere.
Snow is everywhere else.
Lonely junco.
Jet’s go! (Heavily modified.)

Leftovers

Some odds and ends shots in black & white.

Fog, not smoke haze.
Downy woodpecker. This was colour, but the ‘blown out’ portion was a ridiculous mess of white, yellow, and green while the bird was pretty much B&W in shadow. Desaturation solved the problem.
Mushrooms are in bloom.
Vigilant robin.
Beached shoes.
Male varied thrush hunting seeds in the bushes.