noise to signal

A peek behind the curtain

The title could describe the photo I'm posting today, which I realized only after I wrote it, but what I really meant is that I thought this would be a good picture to use as a another demonstration of what a photo goes through here at Noise to Signal before it gets posted.

I have what could be described as a manipulative printing style — what we might have once called "heavy on darkroom technique". (And yes, that sentence was designed to make my friends still working in the darkroom cringe, because I'm a bad person.)

Nearly all black and white printers manipulate contrast and burn and dodge to some extent, but more manipulative printers treat the original image as no more than a basis to start from. This doesn't mean that we use it to cover for poor technique at exposure time — in fact it's much easier to be a manipulative printer if you're starting with a pefectly exposed image. As Ansel Adams (himself an extremely manipulative printer) used to say, "the negative is the score, the print is the performance".

My own printing style is heavily influenced by a photographer named Roy DeCarava, who is a master of getting beautiful, rich, expressive detail in the shadow areas of his prints, with very few light values in the photo.

So, on to the demo. Let's start with the raw image, straight out of the camera with a default conversion applied. You can see that it's pretty bland, with none of the richness I'm looking for in a final image. Plus, hey, it's in color, which isn't what I want for this photo. (There's a whole discussion here about how I still see mostly in black and white that will have to wait for a future post) There are, however, the bones of an interesting photo here.

A default conversion to black and white looks a little better — it's starting to get more graphical, which is what I'm looking for — but it's still pretty gray overall.

Increasing the contrast while converting it to black and white with The Imaging Factory's Convert To BW Pro brings it closer to what I envisioned when I saw the photo originally, but it's still not quite right.

And here's the final version. I've increased the contrast on the flag in the window, increased the contrast on the bricks on the left side of the image, and added some edge burning to the left, right, and bottom edges. In the web image the detail in the shadows to the right of the flag seems to have disappeared, but there's plenty hinted at there in the print version.

And, because I can't resist, here's another "that 5d captures so damn much data I can't stand it" crop. What's that in the window below the one with the flag in it? Why, it's a dancing Shiva (?) and an elephant tucked in the corner. I could probably extract a bit more sharpness out of these, but I don't really want them to call too much attention to themselves in the final print.