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This issue features many valuable resources on B&W palettes.
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This issue features many valuable resources on B&W palettes.
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Remember, your username is your email. Your password is free.
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You can learn a lot just by looking at great photographs.
Want to learn more about black and white images?
Start by studying these five photographers.
Alfred Stieglitz explored the softer sensibility of platinum with muted blacks, very full highlights, and a surprising range of tints.
View 12 Great Photographs By Alfred Stieglitz here.
Ansel Adams epitomized the modern sensibility with deep blacks, bright whites, and a full smooth range of tones in between.
View 12 Great Photographs By Ansel Adams here.
Brett Weston moved modern photography towards abstraction with extreme contrast often eliminating shadow and sometimes highlight detail.
View 12 Great Photographs By Brett Weston here.
Huntington Witherill advances the classic modern sensibility into the contemporary by achieving extreme separation in even the deepest blacks and the brightest whites, often side-by-side.
View 12 Great Photographs By Huntington Witherill here.
Joyce Tenneson has explored many high key black and white palettes over her career – neutral in her early years, semi-neutral tints mid-career, and more recently gold-leafed.
View 12 Great Photographs By Joyce Tenneson here.
View more 12 Great Photographs Collections here.
Read more in my Black & White lessons.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
There are as many reasons to add color back into black-and-white photographs as there are ways to do it.
You can change the emotional tone of photographs when you add warm or cool tints to them.
You can separate areas of a photograph by toning them differently.
You can enhance the illusion of volume in a photograph by adding different colors into highlights and shadows; typically highlights are warm and shadows are cool.
You can increase volume further by adding gradations of hue in specific regions of a photograph; typically this is done with brushes.
You can add still greater realistic complexity by restoring trace amounts of the original color.
If you increase the saturation of any of these treatments beyond a low level, you turn black-and-white photographs into color photographs.
Read more in my Black & White lessons.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life Of Trees
What’s it about? The forest is a social network. Groundbreaking scientific discoveries describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers.
The author is Peter Wohlleben who spent over twenty years working for the forestry commission in Germany before leaving to put his ideas of ecology into practice. He now runs an environmentally friendly woodland in Germany, where he is working for the return of primeval forests.
The big take away? Plants are more like us than you ever would have dreamed.
Find the book here.
Rob Knight’s Follow Your Gut
What’s it about? It’s a detailed tour of the ‘micro-biome’ in our guts and it’s influences on our mind, plus an exploration of the known effects of antibiotics, probiotics, diet choices, birth method, and access to livestock on our children’s lifelong health.
The authors are computational biochemist Dr. Rob Knight and award winning science writer Brendan Buhler.
The big take away? Our bodies are hosts to vast webs of life that influence our health and consciousness.
Find the book here.
Lyall Watson’s Heaven’s Breath
What’s it about? Heaven’s Breath looks at the ways in which the winds profoundly affect the earth’s surface and influence plant and animal behavior. First, the author shows how the winds bring the world to life, providing the circulatory and nervous systems of the planet, disseminating energy and information, distributing warmth and bringing rain, making soil and air-conditioning the globe. Then he discusses the way the wind disperses plants and animals, shapes natural communities and gives rise to an aerial ecology of creatures and aero-plankton, which rise and fall over every square mile of land. There are chapters on wind sensitivity, including the creation of a new Beaufort Scale of wind forces, and a look at how the mistral, sirocco, Santa Ana and other winds alter human physiology and psychology to a degree that can lead to disease, suicide and even murder. In the historical section the author describes how the trade winds have influenced human migrations and in war have determined the outcome of battles and shaped empires. In the chapters on wind myth and folklore he shows how experience of the mystery of wind has been directly responsible for the origins of consciousness and the growth and development of religious belief, and he discusses its manifestations in art, music and literature.
The author is Lyall Watson who holds doctorates in anthropology and ethology (animal behavior) and additional degrees in botany, chemistry, geology, geography, marine biology, and ecology. Watson logically investigates illogical events.
The big take away? Our atmosphere is complex, dynamic, mysterious, and filled with life.
Find the book here.
James Lovelock’s Gaia : A New Look At Life On Earth
What’s it about? The Earth functions as a single organism and living matter influences air, ocean, and rock to form a complex, self-regulating system that has the capacity to keep the Earth a fit place for life.
The author is James Lovelock is the multi-award winning chromatographer and originator of the Gaia Theory.
The big take away? The earth is alive.
Find the book here.
Ervin Lazlo’s Science And Akashic Field Theory
What’s it about? Mystics and sages have long maintained that there exists an interconnecting cosmic field at the roots of reality that conserves and conveys information, a field known as the Akashic record. Recent discoveries in vacuum physics show that this Akashic Field is real and has its equivalent in science’s zero-point field that underlies space itself. This field consists of a subtle sea of fluctuating energies from which all things arise: atoms and galaxies, stars and planets, living beings, and even consciousness. This zero-point Akashic Field is the constant and enduring memory of the universe. It holds the record of all that has happened on Earth and in the cosmos and relates it to all that is yet to happen. From the world of science he confirms our deepest intuitions of the oneness of creation in the Integral Theory of Everything.
The author is Ervin Laszlo, twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, author of 83 books translated into 21 languages, and the founder and president of the international think tanks the Club of Budapest and the General Evolution Research Group.
The big take away? Everything is connected. As time passes the universe becomes more information rich.
Find the book here.
Find more Recommended Reading here.
Enjoy this collection of quotes by photographer Pete Turner.
“If photography has developed a special language it should be welcomed as an extension of our senses and seen for what it is – the first faulting steps of an infant medium towards maturity.” – Pete Turner
“It has been said a thousand times that photography is a universal language. To accept this notion is to ignore the fact that its meanings cannot be translated in anything other than a woolly and imprecise manner.” – Pete Turner
“What have I done wrong?” -he said later.” Nothing, I think. I am steadily surprised that there are so many photographers that reject manipulating reality, as if that was wrong. Change reality! If you don’t find it, invent it!” – Pete Turner
“Looking at photographs, like taking them, can be joyful, sensuous pleasure. Looking at photographs of quality can only increase that pleasure.” – Pete Turner
“Color takes my work into another dimension. It’s the way I see. I’ve always been drawn to the colors of nature, and nature is a wonderful teacher.” – Pete Turner
“Ultimately, simplicity is the goal – in every art, and achieving simplicity is one of the hardest things to do. Yet it’s easily the most essential.” – Pete Turner
“A photographers work is given shape and style by his personal vision. It is not simply technique, but the way he looks at life and the world around him.” – Pete Turner
Find out more about Pete Turner here.
Explore 12 Great Photographs By Great Photographers
Explore The Essential Collection Of Quotes By Photographers.
Explore The Essential Collection Of Documentaries On Photographers.
In all of my work, there’s a strong sense of abstraction. I want the foundations of my images to be suggestive and expressive. I want to create images that give us an opportunity to simultaneously look out into the world and into ourselves. By never losing sight of the fact that we are looking at a flat image of a deep world, the illusions it creates, and the suspension of disbelief we enter into, we are reminded to look at ourselves looking. The psychic space created for greater awareness is the heart of my images.
I’m obsessed with the horizon and a majority of my images contain one, but not these images. In my virtual petroglyphs, I want to be drawn into an even more intimate space, physically and emotionally.
In this image, Alignment XXXVI, there’s a strong correspondence between two kinds of flow: the flowing forms of the stone and the flowing lines of the petroglyph of subatomic particles scattering. Two qualities of space and time collide. One is a physical form that takes on abstract qualities when seen in a particular way; the other is an abstract image made by a particular way of seeing that takes on physical dimensions. These primordial patterns suggest an order of reality that we’re unaccustomed to but which is essential to our understanding of the nature of the universe and ourselves.
Like the photograph rendered by the camera, the pattern this petroglyph renders is made with another special device made for looking more deeply into the universe. Bubble chambers work by filling a device with liquid heated to just below its boiling point. The entire chamber is subject to a constant magnetic field that causes charged particles entering it to travel in helical paths (whose radius is determined by their velocities and mass), around which the liquid vaporizes, forming microscopic bubbles. Bubble densities around tracks are proportional to a particle’s energy loss. Bubbles grow in size as the chamber expands until they are large enough to be seen or photographed. The resolution of bubble chambers goes down to a few micrometers. Several cameras are mounted around it, allowing a three-dimensional image of an event to be captured. Invented in 1952, bubble chambers are outdated, but the images produced with them still shape our understanding of the structure of matter and the nature of the universe. In one sense, this is a photograph of a photograph. The marriage of two kinds of looking in one image highlights opportunities for looking in another way – inward with the mind’s eye.
This is the only petroglyph rendered from a photograph. Other petroglyphs in this series extend our ways of seeing by reproducing diagrams of reality rendered from theory, patterns that we are currently incapable of capturing mechanically (the orbits of our solar system’s planets, the shape of our Milky Way galaxy, the arrangement of starry super-clusters, etc.) but which we extrapolate from our composite understanding of the universe. The series zooms through our understanding of the universe, from the subatomic to the whole of the known universe, never losing sight of the fact that our understanding continually changes, expanding, and evolving, never more rapidly than today.
We create tools to extend our perception, like the camera. Each tool offers us one window into the universe. Of course, it’s limited. It sees in one way. So what’s been left out? And what are we missing? But it’s still able to produce at least one piece of the puzzle. It’s hard enough to use existing tools to learn to see in new ways. It’s even harder to use existing tools (or create new tools) to see things you can’t yet conceive of. But it’s worth a try. I can assure you it’s a rewarding process.
View the video on Alignment XXXVI here.
View the video on the series Alignment here.
Read more of The Stories Behind The Images here.
John Sexton Celebrates the black and white print.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
Read more with my online Printing Resources.
View more with my Printing DVD.
Unsharpened / Hybrid / Strong HDR
HDR software is most typically used to render shadow and highlight detail, but it can also be used to enhance tonal separation and detail in any range of tones, even in images with extremely low contrast. The very same tools that are used to compensate for HDR side effects can be used to sharpen any image.
When multiple bracketed exposures are merged into a single processed file, shadows and highlights that exceed the dynamic range of a camera’s sensor are compressed into the dynamic range of a digital file, taking the mid-tones with them. Depending on the HDR software used, a variety of tools are available to restore contrast and separation in mid-tones. If used aggressively, these tools produce the telltale signs of contemporary or grunge HDR artifacts – halos and texture accentuation. These are the very same artifacts that digital sharpening routines use more conservatively to make images appear sharper - only they look different.
Unlike the hard halo and line produced by the filter Unsharp Mask and more like the soft line produced by the filter High Pass, HDR sliders can give you still more points of control over line and texture, each with a slightly different flavor.