M A Andrew Black and White Photography Blog

Location: Suffolk, England

Lenses used: Sigma 30 1.4 Ex, Sigma 28-70 2.8 Ex, Sigma 70-200 2.8 Ex, Sigma 10-20 4-5.6 Ex.

Flash used: Sigma EF-500 DG Super

Recent shots from a wedding in the South of England. Color calibration has not been implemented fully on these yet so some do exhibit a slight greenish cast. All shots were taken in raw and then developed in Adobe lightroom.

You have probably looked around the web and seen images with fantastic clarity and colour fidelity and thought why don’t my images have the same vibrancy and colour rendition? Well chances are you need to follow a couple of basic steps. I use the word basic because I am deliberately avoiding recommending spending (too much) money on costly colour calibration tools. Anyone can get their colours in the right general area.

1) Calibrate your monitor with the tools you probably didn’t know you had installed.

Windows: If you own Photoshop 3 or later, you will probably don’t realise that it comes with a little utility called Adobe Gamma. Find this by doing a quick search and follow the on screen prompts. This should get your monitor displaying colours in the right ballpark.

Mac Users: Use the System Preferences–>Display—>Colours—> and Calibrate to fine tune Mac Colours.

2) Invest in a cheap ebay white balance lens cap.
These are available on ebay for about £1 GBP typically from Hong Kong. Some professionals will pour scorn over the quality of these but again they will get you in the right area colour wise. They are dead simple to use. Before shooting a scene, place over your lens, find your cameras white balance settings and choose custom white balance. Shoot the image with the lens cap on. (You might need to leave your lens in Manual focus mode to shoot). Once the white balance is captured successfully, you are good to carry on shooting.

3) Shoot Raw.
If your camera has a raw/jpg option, choose raw. Raw is like a digitial negative and allows you to make far more adjustments than a compressed JPG image. Professional photographers are shooting raw and with the cheap price of memory today (Raw files are larger), coupled with the speed of most modern computers (for editing raw files), you really have no excuse.

4) Make final adjustments in Photoshop/ Lightroom/ Image Editing
Sometimes, the white balance in a scene might need a little adjusting. Sometimes to true a white balance is not as aesthetically pleasing as you might want. Use a photo editor to adjust contrast and saturation. Hopefully, your shots should be free from colour casts!

Not my usual type of image but there was something about this shot that I really loved. I think this was taken in around 2004. Light was really magical and on rare occasions sometimes black and white photography doesn’t do justice to the scene before you. This was one of those times.

Decided to start printing all my prints using Hahnemuhle photo rag 308 gsm. This is arguably the best photographic paper for digital photography and in particular black and white digital photography. As a consequence, I have had to up prices but feel the increase in quality should be more than worth the extra price.

More information can be found at the Hahnemuhle website www.hahnemuhle.com

Yesterday, I took my Sigma SD10, which is still a great camera, and removed the filter from in front of its mirror. I then spent the day shooting with, and without, a Hoya R72 Infra Red filter attached. It produced some outstanding results. I particularly liked this shot. The web version really doesn’t do the colours of the image justice.

I think this will be the way I will use the SD10 from now on. - As a sort of experimental/infra red back up camera. I have trips to London and Tuscany booked for the next month and am looking forward to trying this combination out.

What was interesting was that the Hoya filter could be discarded and the camera would produce very interesting images. I found without the Hoya the best way to expose was to dial in a negative -3 stops. I will probably come back and post more images as they arrive.

 Update….

 These are two more from that session. The images themselves are not much to look at but they are not bad considering I didn’t venture out of the house!