Hi everyone, a couple of things that will hopefully be of interest to you all. Firstly, many thanks to John from Frankfurt who emailed me the following:
‘I thought you might be interested in the article (book? It’s 240+ pages long) “Spain Going Places” by William Chislett. Very interesting and sponsored by Telefonica, which means it is free.’
I certainly was interested, and the book, subtitled “Economic, Political and Social Progress, 1975-2008″ is definitely required reading for confirmed hispanophiles. You can get hold of the mammoth pdf via this direct download link.
Secondly, for all you avid Spain photographers out there, don’t forget to check out, and hopefully join and add your images to, another addition to the NFS Flickr scene: the “Spain: Black and White Street Photography” group. I find street photography fascinating at the moment, and think Spain is a pretty fine place to practice the art!
Photo: Faces of Spain 1, from my La Virgin Dolorosa set.
luke
26 Mar 08 at 8:39 am
Can I be the Devil’s advocate and ask why street photography in black and white?
Thanks for book link.
Ben
26 Mar 08 at 8:46 am
Hmmm, it could of course be in colour as well, there is just something romantic maybe, in a Cartier Bresson sense, about black and white. Do you think I should change it to colour too?
frank
26 Mar 08 at 9:55 am
Some here in B/W from last year’s Semana Santa.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/omeyas999/show/
Ben
26 Mar 08 at 10:30 am
Frank, great pics, add a couple to the Street Photography pool!
BrianA
26 Mar 08 at 11:36 am
Naive question maybe. Do you guys take photos in B&W or are they changed in an editor later?
Ben
26 Mar 08 at 12:07 pm
Not naive at all! I used to set my camera to take in black and white jpegs, but now I am taking pictures in RAW format so they go in as colour and then get changed to B and W in the editor. I usually know while I am taking them though that I’m going to convert them to B and W later.
frank
26 Mar 08 at 12:26 pm
Like Ben, my camera has the facility to take only in black and white if required, but I always shoot in colour. You can always covert from colour to B/W, but not the other way around! ;-( You get the best of both worlds shooting as normal, in colour.
luke
26 Mar 08 at 1:15 pm
I think B/W adds a certain melancholy to an image but maybe it’s a bit too niche to exclude colour. On the other hand it is sometimes interesting to give yourself rules like the Dogma films (ie. only use available light and no tripod etc).
I notice your title to the blog (header?) is a street photo in colour; it’d be perverse to shoot those dresses/fans in B/W.
I find that I shoot B/W when structure or shape is an important element to the image or too create mood. Flat dull light also becomes more interesting in B/W and low light or different light temperatures also favour B/W. Looking at your photos I can see that you use these principles too.
As too shooting in colour then converting, well I go through a few hoops in Photoshop to convert, just using ‘desaturate’ doesn’t give enough contrast.
Ben
26 Mar 08 at 2:11 pm
Luke, I agree that it is sometimes limiting to exclude colour, but I suppose I just created the group because I am so fond of the black and white medium, and it is so often ignored these days. You are right, flat light often plays a big part in deciding go monochrome, but for me it’s a lot to do with the subject matter too.
Photoshop cs3 has a black and white image adjustment menu where you can properly convert to b and w and decide whether to apply red, yellow etc filters in the process.
frank
26 Mar 08 at 2:39 pm
I wouldn’t think anyone that takes photography fairly seriously simply uses “desaturate”, there are a multitude of better ways of achieving the end result, a variety of hoops you you can go through. For me, I have literally many thousands of colour photos, but that is the only gallery I have in B/W, it makes a nice change.
luke
26 Mar 08 at 5:14 pm
I’ve been on CS2 until recently (colour lab mode to channels to dupe layer to multiply) so I’ll check out CS3 B/W conversion. In the old silver halide days I used red filter with most B/W for max contrast.
Ben
27 Mar 08 at 8:40 am
@Luke, it’s under the Image > Adjustments menu.
luke
27 Mar 08 at 9:37 am
@Ben. I’ll check it out, cheers