Black and White is sometimes right

I've been shooting Ilford HP5 plus film for the past week or so. Naturally I haven't got any examples because the roll is still in the camera with eight or so frames left. This weekend, my wife and I went up to Edmonton for a run she was doing and it was a great opportunity to shoot some of the buildings in the capital city's downtown.

Naturally, I also brought my digital camera with me and I was pretty pleased with the images I got. For fun and because I was inspired by shooting black and white film,  I processed some of my favorites using Silver Efex Pro. The program does great monochrome conversions and can emulate a number of well known black and white films. While I didn't try the HP5 option I was pretty pleased with the results.

I always find it interesting how you can get different looks with monochrome by changing a few settings. I remember when I used to process image I would select grayscale if I wanted to do a black and white image. Heck I didn't even know about desaturating to get a black and white! I love the graphic look I get whether its via the channel mixer in Lightroom and Paint Shop Pro X2 or the filter options in Silver Efex Pro.


A great book to learn about digital black and white photography is Michael Freeman's Mastering Black and White Digital Photography. You can also check out the eBook The Power of Black and White over at Craft and Vision for $5.

Some of my other images from this weekend can be found here.