photog.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A place for your photos and banter. Photog first is our motto Please refer to the site rules before posting.

Administered by:

Server stats:

251
active users

#Trichrome

0 posts0 participants0 posts today

Lens-Artists Challenge #335: Exploring Colour vs Black & White

This week, Patti of Creative Exploration in Words and Pictures is hosting the Challenge and she’s asking us to look at our use of colour or black & white in our photography. ‘When is it best to use one vs the other?’ She ponders: ‘What’s the benefit of each one?’

Patti sets us a challenge, ‘to explore the difference and the impact of using color [sic] or black & white photography in your selected photos. … Post pairs of the same image in both color and black & white. Limit the number of images to 3 pairs.’ She continues by asking us to: ‘Compare the differences in mood, texture, and light. Share your thoughts on how black & white or color processing impacts each photo. Tell us which one you prefer.’

I tend to use colour a lot in my photography, especially in film photography where I’m a big fan of those colour shifting emulsions like Lomochrome Turquoise or Purple. But in my digital work, I’m a little less … picky. 

Often it will depend on the subject. Most of my intentional camera movement (ICM) work is done in colour, I feel that ICM benefits from colour a lot, but the exception is urban ICM, which I think is much better in black and white. Similarly, if I’m out recording some street art then that always deserves colour — even if, or especially if, it’s starting to decay.

Sometimes, though, I set out to make images in black and white, then create colour images from them. There’s nothing I like more than taking an old digicam from the 2000s (the noughties) and testing out the infrared sensitivity of its lovely, lovely CCD sensor. This is often the first thing I do with every new digital camera I get my hands on, and the results can be … interesting. 

For example, here is a black and white infrared image of the steel footbridge over the Parque de Infante Dom Pedro in Aveiro. Taken with a Samsung Digimax U-CA3 digital camera from 2003, the camera has been set to monochrome mode and the image taken through a Hoya 720nm Infrared filter. It’s a typical looking infrared image, with white vegetation, which reflects the infrared wavelengths falling upon it, and dark skies and the metal of the bridge, which do not.

But when you take more monochrome images, using red and green filters, and edit the images as layers in a photo editor, everything changes. Suddenly the vegetation becomes shades of red, the sky becomes a bright blue or turquoise, and the image just pops. This is what I call a digital aerochrome, after the long defunct colour infrared emulsion made by Kodak and based on the procedure devised by Joshua Bird. He developed his method using infrared film, but the same technique applies to digital photography as well.

You can have a lot of fun with a digital camera and a set of filters. Take this infrared image of a landscape with lovely wispy clouds in the sky. It’s an OK infrared image in black and white, with the clouds popping against a dark sky. But make it into a digital aerochrome and suddenly the clouds become a kaleidoscope of colour. This is down to the clouds moving in the sky between the three exposures. When the images are lined up in the photo editor the colours of the filters don’t match and are presented in the image as individual colours.

Of course, it doesn’t always go as planned. Turns out this Konica Q-M100, a 1,3MP digital camera from 1997, can’t actually be set to monochrome mode, and the digital aerochromes were absolutely awful. That said, the regular colour images were quite stunning, but through an infrared filter, all of a sudden the image became almost monochrome in appearance. It looked as though a sepia filter had been applied, and personally I found this much more appealing than the colour image.

Sometimes we can combine two techniques. I thought that it might be a nice idea to try some infrared ICM. The results were less than stellar, though, I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a more boring infrared image, or ICM image for that matter.

But when you make a digital aerochrome of the infrared woodland image, by taking further ICM images through red and green filters, all of a sudden the ICM becomes much more interesting. I’ve used this technique two or three times, and I really love how it comes out.

So instead of using these noughties digicams for ‘regular’ colour photography, odds are that during the sunny spring and summer months you’ll find me wandering around the woods behind our house or in Aveiro with a noughties digicam set to monochrome mode and my little collection of filters. So if you ask me, do I prefer to use colour or black and white, I can happy say, BOTH!

Next week, Ann-Christine will host the Challenge, so I hope that you can join us then. Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

Lens-Artists Challenge #326: This Made Me Smile

This week it was the turn of Ann-Christine (Leya) from To See a World in a Grain of Sand … to host the Lens-Artists Challenge, and she chose as her theme, ‘This Made Me Smile‘. In her post she says, ‘So much in this world is rather tough right now, … don’t we all need a smile? Let’s share something that made us smile, … and make the world smile with us!’ 

This funtograph was found on a Gameboy Pocket Camera (the Japanese version of the GBC). I’m not sure if it was pre-loaded or taken by the user in the 1990s.

Well naturally this was a bit of a head-scratcher for me since my images are rarely funny or cute. We don’t have any pets and the kid is all grown up so most of my ‘fun’ images are strange out of focus abstracts, or blurred ICM landscapes. So I thought I would introduce you to one of my favourite pastimes: taking funtographs. What? You might say, don’t you mean photographs? No, definitely funtographs, with emphasis on the fun.

A trichrome funtograph of a playground in Oliveira do Bairro.

Back in 1998, Nintendo released the Gameboy camera to accompany its hand held gaming console, the Gameboy. The Gameboy Camera is a monochrome camera that records four shades of grey to produce super low resolution funtographs (as Gameboy photographs are known). In today’s terms the Gameboy camera has a whopping 0.014MP.

A funtograph of the water tower in Oliveira do Bairro-A funtograph of a hotel in Coimbra.

The Gameboy camera is actually a full spectrum device — the sensor has no infrared cut filter to stop wavelengths outside the visible spectrum from showing on the image — so in full sunlight trees and vegetation come out a strange white (‘strange’ if you’re not familiar with how infrared images look). Indoors, or at night, you don’t have so many issues and images look normal, but during the day using an infrared cut filter stops these extra infrared wavelengths reaching the sensor and the images look much more natural.

A funtograph of my favourite tree and well taken with the Gameboy camera.A funtograph of my favourite tree and well taken with the GBC and an infrared cut filter.

Although getting good results from the Gameboy camera can be quite hit-and-miss, it can produce some lovely monochrome funtographs. But with a little work it can also produce some striking trichromes too, and even digital aerochromes using infrared filters. Making infrared trichromes — digital aerochromes that emulate the look of the defunct film Kodak Aerochrome film — is one of my favourite pastimes, and I attempt this with all new cameras, often with mixed success. 

An aerochrome funtograph of a tree in Carris.A trichrome funtograph of the water tower in Oiã.

I’ve been the proud owner of a Gameboy console and the Gameboy Camera since January 2023, and it’s my favourite camera of all time. I managed to get my hands on one for the Shitty Camera Challenge #1990sCameraChallenge, and since I’ve had one it’s been hard to put down. I’m also convinced that the Gameboy was the factor that tipped the scales into my becoming Shitty Camera Challenge Champion for the 1990s Camera Challenge, probably the single most important achievement of my whole life. 😉

A trichrome funtograph of a scene from the Coronation of King Charles III (taken from the TV).An aerochrome funtograph of a windswept tree. In the background in an overpass.

I hope these few examples of Gameboy funtographs brought a smile to your face, and the next time you are shopping around for a new digital camera perhaps the Gameboy might fit the bill? Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.

A trichrome funtograph of a sunset in Águas Boas.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

Yay! I made a #trichrome. First for a little while. Big cheat though, handheld digital images processed to B&W with RGB filters and then combined. Not sure what to think, but I made it so you have to see it. Soz, I don't make the rules... 😁

It's a self portrait btw. That's me in the reflection being nothing like Lee Friedlander 🙄

Kehlturm der Wilhelmsburg in Ulm.

Diese Aufnahme ist zu schön: Sie täuscht über die Geschichte dieser Festung hinweg.

In der Wilhelmsburg in Ulm wurden 1944 polnische Zwangsarbeiterinnen untergebracht. Nach dem Krieg ausgebombte Bürger und Flüchtlige.

Starting the beginning of July there’ll be a new Shitty Camera Challenge and I’ve been thinking about what I might do this time around. I have a couple of ideas, but just lately I’m really enjoying experimenting with a new to me camera, the Canon Powershot G12. The snag is that at 10MP the G12 is not Shitty Camera compliant, and even if it was the camera is just too darn good to use in the Challenge, so I felt that I needed a backup. Something that behaves just like the Powershot G12 but with half of the pixels.

And that’s where the Powershot G5 comes in. Originally I found a slightly flakey G5 from the Kamerastore website and then a second one came from the CEX website, advertised as a ‘generic’ camera but in beautiful condition, for the princely sum of 3€. The PowerShot G5 was the fourth in the G series of digital cameras, introduced by Canon in 2003. It seems to me that ergonomic design was not at the forefront of the designers’ minds when they made the Powershot G5 as the best way to describe its look is, ‘la brick’. With a 5MP CCD sensor, it features a 4x zoom, an optical viewfinder and a swivelling colour LCD screen. Images are stored on CompactFlash cards, since during the noughties every camera manufacturer seemed to have their own medium for storing photographs.

So I thought it might be a good idea to remind myself how these G5s perform. The G5 from the CEX website was in pristine condition when it arrived, although the battery was not the original Canon battery. On the other hand, the Kamerastore G5 was in slightly worse condition, described as ‘glitchy’ with a flickering LCD screen, but otherwise working fine. I knew that they both performed well in natural colour, and black and white, but when I tried to make trichromes and digital aerochromes the Kamerstore G5 gave a decidedly strange response.

On consecutive days I took the G5s across the road to my favourite tree and well and around the block in tge woods gehind the house and put them through their paces. With the cameras in programme (P) mode and the ISO set to its lowest setting (50), in colour mode I took one natural colour image and then a second image with the infrared filter for red/blue channel mixing. I then set the G5s to monochrome mode, to one image without a filter and then subsequent images with red, green, blue, and infrared filters to make trichromes and digital aerochromes. Back at home I used GuIMP photo editor to red/blue channel mix the colour infrared image and made trichromes from the red, green, and blue filter images. TO make the digital aerochromes I used the infrared, red, and green filter images for the red, green and blue laters, respectively. Blend mode between layers was set to ‘addition’.

The results were fabulous. There was no sign of the strange results from my first experiment and both G5s behaved admirably. I also tried a few infrared channel swapping images and these worked too. Though I have to G5s to chose from with the Shitty Camera Challenge I think I’ll start with the older ‘glitchy’ Powershot G5 and use the Canon LA-DC58B lens filter adapter, which is a little plastic gizmo that fits to the front of the lens of the G5 and allows the use of 58mm circular filters.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

https://keithdevereux.wordpress.com/2024/07/14/getting-ready-for-the-next-shittycamerachallenge-with-the-canon-powershot-g5/