I've always loved B&W photography, I was raised on it in my father's darkroom, and for many years shot nothing but. Then for ages, I switched over and shot nothing but colour slide film, only coming back to B&W on rare occasions. But when I switched over to being fully digital in 2001, I started once more to dabble in B&W using the 'digital darkroom'.
Being able to post process an image file allows one to tailor the image as you like, whether it's in colour or B&W, or even a mixture of both. Of course, this is if you shoot in colour (JPEGs) to start with, or as I usually do, in RAW mode, where the RAW file is just a dump right off the camera's sensor, virtually completely unprocessed. The cameras that I use for most of my work are Sony NEX 7 bodies that produce a 24MP file, which is quite large (6000 x 4000 pixels). Now for my web work, I really only need a 1200 x 800 pixel file, so typically, my workflow is to process the 24MP RAW file to a JPEG file that is then used on my website or blogs.
Today, for our walk at Schooner Cove, I wanted to try to see if I could get reasonable JPEGs right out of the cameras, with no post processing. I set the NEX 7s up for capture Fine JPEG at a resolution of 6MP, using the B&W 'film' settings modified to +3 on the Contrast and +3 on the Sharpening. I also set the exposure compensation, which I usually have set to -3EV, to 0, because with B&W, I'm not overly worried about losing the highlights. The only thing I had to do in the computer was to downsize the final images to 1200 x 800 pixels.
Here are the resulting pictures:
I'm not completely sure if I like the results compared to shooting RAW and then processing on the computer, which allows me a huge amount of control to produce localized modifications as well as tinting etc, but then this was an experiment after all. I'll need to play around with the settings some more and see whether I can make this work or not. But for now, I hope you enjoy the images.
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