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Originally Posted by Mr. P Just what I was doing too..But hey, that's part of it.
Success is a photo you can feel. Creating it takes evaluation, of exposure, contrast, composition etc.
Great hobby! |
I agree that all are important. However, photography is an art form. It doesn't really 'need'
technical evaluation for the most part. It is mostly about using exposure, contrast, composition, etc. to evoke a feeling or mood. Getting caught up too much in the details like:
"is this photograph properly exposed?" or
"shouldn't this photograph have more/less contrast (saturation, etc.)?" or
"why not in color?"
etc.
gets people caught up in evaluating the technical aspects.
I've seen plenty of photos that were '
technically' crap (too much contrast, saturation, shot into the sun, under/overexposed) that were fantastic
because of, not
in spite of these 'problems'.
These questions would serve the photographer better if they were phrased:
"If you had under exposed this photo slightly, it would have really contributed to the sleepy mood of the subject matter" or
"If the picture of the children playing had been in color, you could have increased the saturation to emphasize the energy and playfulness of the subjects" or
"If you desaturated that photo a bit more, it would really contribute to the cold environment that the subject was standing in"
You get the idea.
RE: Why in B&W?
Honestly? Two of the pictures in this series 'begged' to be in B&W. The one of the giraffe, with the 'X' shaped out of focus (OOF) highlights, and the bear. (BTW, the 'X' shaped highlights are the result of shooting through a chain link fence with a short enough depth of field (DOF) to blur the fence into non-existence. A cool side effect is the OOF highlights taking on the shape fo the fence.)
I could have easily processed the other photos in this series in color. I didn't for two reasons.
First, I wanted the all of the photos to 'match'.
Second, I shot these photos through a consumer grade (cheap) 75-300mm 4-5.6 lens. This lens provides poor contrast, saturation, and sharpness. As such, I stopped it down to f/8 to try to preserve some semblence of clarity. I was also shooting @ 150-300mm in many of these shots, hand-held, so I had to shoot at ISO 800 - 1600 to avoid camera shake (Image Stabilization (IS) would have allowed me to shoot at ISO 100 in this situation). ISO 800 and 1600 can be pretty noisy/grainy and I thought that this would look better in B&W than in color.
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