By Lane Erickson
“To see in color is a delight for the eye, but to see in black and white is a delight for the soul.” – Andri Cauldwell
Another Monday has come and it’s time for my second installment of Monochrome Monday here at Find the Right Light Photography.
I mentioned before that I have been involved in photography for nearly 30 years. This means that a good part of the photography (nearly half) was done with film, long before digital was good enough and affordable enough to jump in.
I’m not really nostalgic, but sometimes I do miss shooting and developing black and white film and printing images in my home darkroom. I never tired of seeing an image appear on a sheet of photo paper sitting in the darkroom tray.
Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE digital photography. I love its immediacy and the ability I have to shoot and review repeatedly until I can see that I’ve created the image I was really after. I also love not having the expense of film, or counting the number of exposures I have left.
I mean I am still sometimes dumbfounded that on the 16mb cards I have loaded in my Fujifilm camera, I can take nearly 2500 images. I’ve done the math several times. One 16mb card equals nearly 70 rolls of 36 exposure film. I carry 3-8 total 16mb cards with me at all times which means I have the equivalent of between 210 to 560 rolls of film! If you’ve ever seen 500 rolls of film all at once, you know that is TONS of film. What a pain it’d be to carry it all while trying to create images.
Anyway, I digress. As I mentioned in a previous post, I do very little black and white digital image creating. I’m not sure why this is, but it is true. The purpose of this series of posts is to push me to think and shoot in black and white again, at least a little more than I normally do.
So for today’s image, I present Black and White Hands. These belong to my kids who were playing in the front room of our house. I had my Nikon D5100 and my favorite Nikkor lens, the 70-200 f/4 VR. I saw the soft light coming in from behind as one of my kids played with a toy on our old piano bench.
I talked my other kids into stacking their hands, from oldest to youngest on the bench. I zoomed to about 90mm and then exposed the image for the portion of the hands closest to me so I could create an image with highlights. It won’t win any contests, but I’m happy with the image.
The exposure was ISO 250, ¼ at f/8. I took advantage of the tripod collar on the lens and had everything mounted on a stable tripod. I shot a dozen or so images with variations in composition. This is the one I liked the most.
Always open to comments, I welcome your thoughts, suggestions and even your critiques. Have a great Friday and best wishes in finding the right light for your own photographs.
