My Film days

Yesterday evening I was teaching a beginners class in Kilalla. Somebody wanted to know about taking black and white pictures with their camera. Of course many digital cameras will produce black and white pictures straight out of the camera, but its not usually the best way to do it. This is because the camera simply ditches the colour information, and so can often produce a "flat black and white image. However if you take the picture in colour and process it to black and white afterwards its manipulating that colour information that will result in rich black and white. This got me thinking back to my film days and all the work that went into producing a good black and white image. I was rarely happy with the "straight print" and would do all kinds of dodging and burning to make parts of an image brighter, and some parts darker to draw the eye and to accentuate parts of the image. well its no different today.
The picture on the left is a desaturated image and is typical of what the camera would produce if you set it to black and white. The picture on the left is the same image , but this one is processed in "Lightroom" using the colour information to change the tones . eg darkening the blues gives the dark rich sky, brightening the greens and the yellows gives definition to the grasses etc. Both pictures are Black and white but I hope you agree the second one is the more effective