Book Review: Black and White Digital Photography

Color is wonderful and is a joy to behold but for me there is always something special about a Black and White photograph. I'm not sure if this is because for the most of my life when great photos were presented these tended to be B&W images or the mystique that goes around their genre. But I still find them special.

The world is in color so we don't have a natural tendency to see in B&W but with practice, some inner vision, we can all create good black and white photos.
Black and White Digital Photography (photo workshop) book wants people to be better at this genre of photography.

Black and White Digital Photography (the book)

Author Chris Bucher

ISBN 978-0-470-42193-2

Publisher Wiley Publishing Inc.

The book has 10 chapters and I will explain what is basically covered in each and at the end of the article I will give the overall summary for this book.
This is a workbook of sorts and each chapter has an assignment to help you explore some of the material covered in the chapter.

Chapter 1 – Black and White Vision
This chapter is more of a compendium of general information on importance of Black and White photography, why it is a different art from color. It covers how in the color world seeing in B&W involves more of the creative process. The importance of being able to previsualize, understand the timing in 'the moment' and knowing how to wait.  Where to find photographic material and subjects.

Chapter 2 – Photography Fundamentals

A good general introduction to camera setting such as exposure, aperture, shutter speed, iso, white balance and how these each affect the photographic image. Under composition the rule of thirds, balance, symmetry, shape, simplicity, having a point of view and being able to link compositional elements.

Chapter 3 – Getting the Most out of your Camera
This chapter covers handling the buttons and menu settings on your camera. How white balance affects B&W. Glass filters and suggested settings and lens for portraits, landscape, still life and street photography.

Chapter 4 – Working with Light 

This is what I believe where photography really starts.
This chapter covers metering and exposure, basic zone system, the metering modes of your camera. Light quality and direction as well as reflectors and balancing and mixing sources. Light at dusk and after dark.

Chapter 5 – Tools and Toys
This chapter covers add-ons and supporting equipment for your camera that will allow to take more creative images and includes; Infrared photography, lens baby, smaller point and shoot and speciality DSLR camera, strobes, tripods


Chapter 6 – Tonal Quality in Black and White
This chapter covers converting color to B&W, discussing tones and contrast in B&W images, working with shadows and contrast. Also covers understanding how light quality affects tones and looking for highlights and building depth in the shadows.

Chapter 7 – The Black and White Digital file
The process of converting image to B&W, the use of film filters and the debate on raw or jepg file formats

Chapter 8 – Working in the Digital Darkroom
The chapter discusses the process of enhancing your image to bring out more by use of local and global contrast, multiple raw processing, adjustment layers, masks, shadows and highlight tools, additional filters, selective effects, film situations, workflow. The major emphasis is about using photoshop and digital editing tools.

Chapter 9-  Toning, Coloring and Special Effects
The chapter explains the old film processing techniques and how they can be achieved in digital editing such as; old process effects, split toning, coloring to monochrome, infrared effects, high dynamic range, compositing

10 Output Printing and Presentation
Film was about chemical processes, paper, developing and in this chapter the new equivalents of inject printers and paper, calibrating, creating B&W prints, output options

Conclusion and  Recommended Audience
This is a How To book about creating B&W images digitally. It broadly covers all aspects from start to finish about creating this genre of photography as evidenced by the material cover under the chapters. I don't think little was missed except some freeware program.  The author used higher end equipment,  and computer components and information is geared towards this end.

The book contains a lot of photos and all taken by the author. I like the fact that these are ordinary but good images that we would all take as opposed to those over the top studio shots.

The book does contain assignments at the end and these are general in approach. I am a firm believer that assignments should  be precise and more definitive to help focus people clearly in the direction of guidance. Too much ambiguity for beginners causes confusion in their approach.

There is a web site to post your assignment but at this time (new book) there was nothing posted under the B&W book. This site contains the other workbooks from Wiley press about photography.  Some useful information but a little hard to find since its a Bulletin Board system.

See http://www.photoworkshop.com/  under forum. (the books says www.pwassignments.com but routes to address above.)

This is, in my opinion, a beginners book for someone who mainly uses Point&Shoot camera or mid level SLR type only in auto mode and needs to understand photography, equipment and tools from beginning to end. Each item is well explained but only at a level to get you started and with photography, lots of practice is the key to really getting better.

From my own perspective there are so many books about using cameras I think it's better to leave some of the basic materiel out and focus more on taking B&W and then digital editing.

Niels Henriksen

A bike has so much detail at times its best to focus on particular elements only. In this image you get the feeling of power form the large exhaust pipes.

f.4.4 @ 72mm on 18-70 Nikon lens, 1/15sec, IS0 200

Disclaimer: Other than receiving a book to review, which will be given away, I did not or will not receive any remunerations, gifts or any considerations for this review from the publisher, author or anyone affiliated with this book.

Using Guidelines to Increase Focus on Subject

There are several lines that help guide the viewer to the main subject, which is the man & child on the bridge.

Some are natural and some enhanced with photo-editing.

These are:

• Bridge railings
• Top of roof (top right)
• Rippling water starting bottom right. The water just to the left was darkened a little to make contrast greater.
• The darker 'V' portion of the tree that splits above girls head. This was also darkened slightly to increase effect.
• There is a dark patch just to the left of man's head that forms a 'C'.  This was also slightly darkened.

I thought I'd show my own B&W photo, as I'm doing a book review in the next article about Digital B&W editing.

Niels Henriksen

Giant Flying Saucer Cloud

The sky and especially cloud, stormy being the best, have always held a special interest for me.

There is something about their majesty and untold patterns that can form and re-form as the wind passes before you.

Sometimes they are downright scary and deadly and at others more cerebral and safe which works well for a photographer.

On a late summer evening with several rain squall line moving through, there came with the last a giant thundercloud. It wasn't until it was passing and with evening side-lighting that the grandeur of the cloud became apparent.

2 images combined. Each image at 18mm (27mm @ 35mm equ)

From the backyard and out over the fields, it looked like a giant flying saucer with the pillars at the edges of the spacecraft.

The cloud was about 10km (6mi) across, which I also confirmed later from the radar.

It was hard to get a full unrestricted view, as smaller clouds would drift underneath. The cloud's scale was only revealed as different parts became visible over time.

I also took many overlapping images of this cloud at 65mm (100 @ 35mm equ) so that one day I might print a large version of this. Somewhere about 17 ft at 240 dpi, at least in theory.

The above image is made from 2 of the zoomed sections and show the pillar-like cloud texture from the top right of the saucer cloud.

Below is another closeup of an area that is just right of the middle tree top (1st image) and below. This cloud had so many areas with different types of textures and patterns that it would be lost in a web image. It would need to be printed very large for a viewer to appreciate all facets.

I warmed (yellow) the lighter portions and cooled (blue) darker sections of the cloud to increase the visual contrast.

And just to the right of the above image, there was another area that appeared to be like streamers raising from the ground.

I enjoy clouds and I have quite a collection of clouds in all shapes, sizes and intensity.  When I look and subsequently photograph clouds, I enjoy the freedom of not being bound by preconceived items and therefore, I can explore their forms more.

Niels Henriksen

Black and White Iris – A Comparison Between Silver Efex Pro and Photoshop B&W Adjustment

This is a review of only 2 approaches to achieve a desired effect with a purple Iris flower. I had placed purple iris flowers in a vase, which I set in front of a white mat board. I wanted to do a study of this flower because of the great purple tones, the strong complimentary yellow colour and great curves and folds. The purple in these flowers are normally so saturated that I needed a very soft light (cloudy day, large window and not in direct light) to not overly darken the shadow areas.

It wasn't until some time later while reviewing the images again that I thought about trying to produce a B&W version.

I didn't want a high contrast image but wanted to focus on the great tones and textures as the form was already established by the image taken.

My approach is to open in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) and then to tweak the hue saturation and luminescence for what I think will convert well with a photoshop B&W adjustment layer. I know I can do this directly with the setting in ACR but I find that I have more flexibly creating masks with colour and using ACR to separate colours further apart before bringing into photoshop.

In the image below, you can see by using the blue and magenta sliders I made the bluer tones bluer and the darker purple more magenta. This would give more control over the tones when using the blue and purple slider with the B&W adjustment layer.

I have just finally installed Photoshop on my new computer as the CS3 (windows XP) version was not migratable to the new windows 7 (64-bit) machine. With 7 processors, 12 GB of RAM and 1.8GB Nividia video card, it sure does fly. I did get the upgrade Veveza II and I thought I would play around with Silver Efex Pro that many photographers seem to enjoy.

I enjoy the B&W adjustment layer version better, mainly because I could bring out more tones, less muddy in the darker portions and I could also turn the yellow stamens white. There was considerable time spent achieving this effect whereas with Silver Efex Pro it was just a click of the button after I selected the processing type and film section.

I do like the Silver Pro version because while still soft, the contrast in texture of the vein like patterns is better. I suspect that if I were to make a final print I would combine the best parts of each through masking and blending modes.

I did add a blue/purple duo-tone and in this case more of a tint to further soften the final image.

Niels Henriksen

Form and Texture – Clouds and Tree Tops

Before Spring starts its mad dash to populate the earth with bright green foliage, the landscape can seem quite desolate.  As a photographer looking for interesting subjects, It may at times appear bleak and uninteresting. Some of us may just decide to wait it out until the glorious colours start to appear again. 

If you have time to observe, and this means more than the cursory glance, objects and subjects may appear if you can wait it out, but you need to see slightly differently.

These photos are all in Black and White because its about texture and shape, and colour would only confuse these elements.

Initially the sky was clear blue, bereft of good detail, at least with a photographer's eye.

Clouds  started to roll in from the north and I wondered if I might be able to match the cloud forms to the top of the bare trees that surrounded the fields around me.

This was not just a random thought occurrence, well it might have been, but there was some history to these thoughts.

For a long while, I had been looking at all the bare tree tops and liked their forms and texture. I just wasn't sure I could capture them in such a way as to make them interesting.

By cascading them against the cloud forms now I could add more interest and complexity to the photograph.

While the tree tops and cloud shapes have similar forms (complementary to each other) the texture is completely opposite. The clouds are very soft and almost non-existent in texture. The tree top branches are hard.

The list below highlight these differences

Clouds              Trees

Soft                    Hard

Fat                     Thin

Low Contrast     High Contrast

Flowing              Rigid

Thin                    Dense

Smooth              Jagged

In the above image I was going to crop the portion (in camera) to where the split in the branches mirrored the split in the clouds, but I found that this longer form worked better. There is more balance between mass of clouds and mass of trees. It takes softer parts to balance smaller denser part.

Down along the pathway there were these giant oak trees, like sentinels guarding the landscape.

The small solitary figure adds more interest to the image and creates a strong focal point.

The tall trees may initially capture your vision but soon the man appears and grabs your focus. Only then when the eye starts to go back up do the diagonals created by the tree branches start to guide the vision.

Sometimes it's important not to think about the actual objects that make up the landscape but to see the spaces and patterns formed and linking individual pieces together.

Niels Henriksen

10 Great Photography Projects - Explore Your Pet Peeve

The meaning of passion is well understood and it is not like an emotion? What stronger emotions are then, than those that annoy, frustrate and generally get in our way of doing what we do. Could that emotion not drive you to create a unique view on what may seem to most people to be acceptable or at least a bearable necessity?

Difficulty: Easy. It’s the couch time that’s harder.

While reading an article on The Online Photographer blog Mike starts off with:

“Here's a modest suggestion for a self-assignment. If you have a "peeve pathology," as defined in the previous post...explore it. Embrace it. Work with it. Emphasize it and exaggerate it. See what you can do.”

 and I found this “explore your peeve” idea intriguing.

The story had mainly to do with some photographers being overly obsessed about noise, level horizon, fringing, etc, and these are all good worries in their own right, but why not embrace with a wider panorama.

Take a look at those life’s nuances and describe the feeling you have about it. See if others can understand what irritates you.

Find a theme or subject(s) that irritates, infuriates, or frustrates you. It can be interactions in everyday life, technology and tools, the weather or anything that rattles your clam.

In a storybook approach, describe in simple terms what makes up this frustration and more importantly how you feel about it. It may be complex so that it will require several interactions or analysis with events  to understand.

Unfortunately this is not a study I have done and for this article I went through my archives to see if I had any photos that work with my pet peeve.  Can you guess from the image below what it might be?

The Camera was set to timer mode and placed on monopod and raised above my head.  That line of crown seems to vanish into infinity. Absolutely no end in sight. Except for the people’s faces, I darkened all the other tones to create a heavier mood.

As you might imagine my pet peeve would be standing in large lines or crowds. In fact, it might be more of an obsession or mania because I tend to plan all such outings to happen at times when crowds thinner than the proverbial hairs on a bald head.

How to convey in a photo an object or scene as an irritant, when at the same time we are trying to make a good photograph, at least in the sense that it’s interesting. This is the harder part of the challenge.

By first describing in words this peeve we can get guidelines to help us contextualize out thoughts in photographic terms.

My own words would be; confining, encroaching, endless, impregnable, massive, no way out, dull, lifeless, edgy, fortress, distressing, murky, gloomy,

How I would approach my analysis of a pet peeve.

In my own case, large crowds are the problem; so taking a photo of a group of people in colourful outfits will not convey the correct mood and B&W will set the tone fittingly.

The feeling of confinement is felt by the narrow alley, massive crowd reinforced by all the poles and flags. The lady with her arms crossed makes this wall of people seem even more impregnable. I decided to leave the top of wires and poles in, as even here, there is no escape by flying away.

I would think photos of people parts cut-off, either at image borders or with object would make the people seem more out of place.  The place itself can be shown in a majestic and pleasing manner. It’s just the people somehow need not to fit right.

There should higher contrast and darker overall tones. Edgier.

If it’s a long line-up, then an indication of the length of line and maybe indicators of frustration in some of the people waiting in line.  A photograph of a long spiraling line-up, taken slightly above their head, showing the unending length of people in front of you, helps to reinforce this sense.

Do you get the feeling you are going the wrong way or swimming against the current?

Have any of you photos that somehow convey your feeling with a pet peeve and if so provide a link and your thoughts about this peeve.


Niels Henriksen

Update:

Brian Auer of Epic Edits Blog has just launched a new site for film photography at Feeling Negative and as with all his work it should be a great place to learn and participate.

Are the Photographic Print Dead?

The free print contest is still open for the month of September. Please leave a comment with the words ‘free print’ included in your comment. I have included some sample images to give an idea of the range of images available.

The title may be a little tongue-in-cheek, as I know there are still a few places where they are in demand and in some ways this topic seems to go against my desire to give away prints.


The reason I ask this is that I wanted to thank my regular readers of ‘My Camera World’ blog, for consistently dropping by to read my articles and view my images, by giving away 2 professional produced prints as a contest. The threshold was when I first reached the 1,000-subscriber mark.


I was completely bewildered when there were very few regular readers that wanted to take a chance at receiving a print for free.


This goes against my other world (not online) where I do sell a few prints at Art fairs and galleries. 11”x14” prints normally sell from $120-$160. I have even had a few sales on the web-based art sites. I have a set of 10 greeting cards printed on 5x7 stock that are in reasonable demand. I know of 2 people who framed some of these cards as the image goes edge to edge.


So far, if I am correct, most of these sales have been to non-photographers.

So I wonder about the following thoughts I have about my readers:

• Do photographers not like to hang prints by other photographers?
• Are prints only wanted from big name photographers?
• Do photographers not have extra room to hang an image?
• Do my blog readers not like to enter contests?
• Is the cost of framing an image prohibitive?
• Do photographers not like to collect other photographer’s prints?
• Do blog readers not trust free give-aways?

I know many of my readers are photographers and most, if not all, I believe would also like to sell their prints.

I would really like to hear your thoughts, as this is something I just don’t understand and with this discussion we could all help each other better understand the photo print market.

I display and collect other photographer’s photos. Its just plain fun to see the work produced by them. Maybe my kids or grandchildren will benefit the appreciation of value with these photographers.


To have an 11’’ x 14’’ image printed on Epson Ultrafine art paper costs me $51.00 by the professional printmaker I use. I estimate that shipping will run about $15.00. So, as you can see, I was willing to spend up to $130 out of my own pocket just to say thanks. There was really no other motive.


In the article on Pixsylated blog Sly Arena in an article ‘Digital Photographers, Welcome Back to 1999 ’, it discusses the demise of still photography with the greater emergence of video.


If video does become the new dominate form, and I think there is a tendency to go that way especially now that large screen TVs or should we call them integrated home entertainment systems, there will be a greater reliance on this item as the preferred display medium. Being it rotating photos, slideshows or videos the wall screen will slowly replace paper.

Video has been around for a long time but it is only in the last few years that we have the real freedom to choose content, type and time. Before, it was limited to mainstream TV and home film movie buffs.


As always there will be collectors of the old ways. Even today there are a few who still prepare glass negatives, but this is such a small set of individuals. Almost like a lost language or tribe to be studied by others.

In the meantime I still produce images of photo paper and cotton rag for those who appreciate the printed form and I hope there are more who still do and will even take a chance on one of mine.

Thanks for your interest.


Niels Henriksen

Canadian Architecture and the Delta Stone Mill

Whenever I head out of town I always have my camera with me, as you never know when a photo opportunity will present itself even travelling well-worn routes. But I must admit that there are times when travelling down the road that I realize too late that I should have stopped. I have gotten better as I do try to stop more often, but for some reason I still miss opportunities. I really need to listen more to that inner voice.

Leaving a friend’s place early one morning, with the top down which makes sightseeing that much easier, I came across a building I had seen many times before. But this morning with the early light and the rich greenness of the late spring landscape this building seemed to beg to be photographed and I did listen.
While I’m not an architectural expert, I do remember that there is really very little true Canadian architecture, at least historical. The one item that did stand out in my memory was the Canadian Barn as pictured above. The main architectural feature being the double angled roof structure.

It was good to see a farm structure that was still showing that there was some life still left in that old building. It even had a fresh coat of red paint. What could be more Canadian. In the unreduced version it is easier to see the fine details of the flowers in the tall grass. If you scan carefully you will notice another red building peeking through the trees.




A little further down the dirt road was a more typical farmhouse rendition, at least in eastern Ontario, of what we have come to expect of old farm buildings. There is lots of character but not very liveable. I should probably ask permission one day to try and photograph some images form inside those dusty and dilapidated rooms. Nothing like a little dust in the air with sunbeams to create instant impact.

Delta Stone Mill

In the village of Delta they have restored the old mill that produced flour for the local inhabitants many years ago. As part of their restoration work they hope to have parts of the mill actually working. This mill is to be on the next Canadian stamp. Unfortunately though, not my image.
The link to the Delta Mill site is here Old Stone Mill

The above is a faux IR image. The orange, yellow, green sliders were set to maximum luminance in ACR. The sky was quite washed out in the morning so I added a gradient to replace the sky and create more of a normal IR sky (dark). The darker sky highlights the white foliage and lighter building better.
This is almost as captured but I did slightly increase the yellow and green luminance.

Digital Storage Solution

Costco in Canada has a very effective external storage solution. It is a Western Digital 2TB Drive that is mirrored as RAID 1, to give you an effective storage of 1 TB. The benefits of this type of solution is that should one drive fail and as far as I know all drives will eventually fail, there is still one drive that will still work. No permanent failure unless a major catastrophe such as lightning or huge power surge. There is software for automatic backups but I don’t use it in this mode. Cost is $309.00 CDN.

I will be away next week on a 5-day oil painting “en plein air” workshop in Lyn Ontario. This is my first time taking any type of workshop and the weather should be good for most of the time. While this is a small village there is an old mill and I will bring my camera because at least this item should be able to make some good images.

Niels Henriksen

SoFoBoMo 2009 – A Walk around the Pond

Well I finally finished my SoFoBoMo 2009 project. It always seems to take more effort near the end, as those little finishing details do seem to add up.

A Walk around the Pond

This year, due to 2 unforeseen events, I was not able to truly complete it within the 31-day timeframe but I did make it by the closing date of end of June.

Since this is not a judged competition with strict rules I hope it is still acceptable since the primary driver is a self undertaking to learn and grow in your skills and have some fun at the same time.



Thoughts on this Year’s SoFoBoMo Book

As I stated in the previous article this subject material was not my first or even second choice but an opportunity that made itself available on one day. While in Denmark I knew I still wanted to make the book, but I wasn’t sure on the subject. Several things floated around in my head as possible ideas but nothing really gelled as I was not always in control of my destinations during this stay.

One day my brother and his wife decided to take all of us to see some water with high cliffs. At least that was my translation’s abilities. I initially had vision of jagged cliffs with large breaking waves along the bottom.


My translation was not perfect and we arrived at Maglose Lake completely surrounded by land and with no large breakers at the shoreline. In fact to me this was more of a pond than a lake.
It was as we started the walk around the pond that I thought I might be able to make the book out of this adventure and then focused on getting more shots that I could use.

It is not a great photographic book but I did manage to complete it and to tell a story at the same time so I was at least successful with that part.


To produce great photography books I do believe that it requires a great investment in time and perseverance. The time it takes to capture your subject in many lights, at different times of day and even in different seasons. Not an undertaking that normally can be completed, at least the photography, within a few hours.

With my second SoFoBoMo book, I realize you do get experience in creating books, which is more than just a compilation of images. There is a need to tell a story with the images in a specific sequence as they unfold. There is also the need to write prose to support the story.


I know that there are some participants that did not finish their books and I wonder if they felt that their effort was not going to measure up against others. I think it is a big mistake to measure yourself in contrast to the other books. Do it because you love it and others will find good parts if not the whole effort great.


The technical stuff about producing this ebook

I once again used Open office to create my document and save as a pdf file. The main reason is that border can be set right to the edge of the page, which I was not able to do in MS word because of printer default limitations. There was always a residual edge and if choosing a coloured background, the whole white edge would show.

Book format is 18cm x 23cm about 7” by 9”

I chose Century Gothic at 11pts as I find the serf fonts harder to read.

The one thing I forgot from last year’s experience was to set each image to anchor on page. In paragraph anchor the image would sometimes move around when changes were made.

I also inserted my text within a frame and anchored this also to page. This gave me complete control to position text anywhere I wanted without having to think about tabs, margins and line spacing. After all, this is mainly a photo book with some text.


I made jpegs with the utility ‘Instant Jpeg from RAW’ and placed into a folder. There I used Adobe Bridge with star rating to reduce the set. Any images with no stars would be deleted (only jpegs). I would keep doing this until I had a manageable set.

I then placed these all into the document and with view set to 25% I would position the images around as I though the story would unfold. This process would also cull a few images and once I felt the set was right I would then work each image in Photoshop for desired effect and size. At the same time I would start working on the text for the images.



Will I do it again Next Year?

Most likely yes. It does take a significant amount of time and energy but in the end it is worth it. If we are serious about art and photography then it will take commitment and determination to see it through to truly learn.

I had wanted a Top-of-the Chart type book with just exceptional images. I was worried at first that my effort would not be good enough and wondered whether I should still proceed or back out. The word failure was slowly rolling around in the back of my mind.

With some reflection I came to the conclusion that this is mainly a book for me, a project for me to learn and develop as a photographer and now a little as a book writer.

If you are being artistic then in my view there is no word “failure”. There is only your vision, skills and effort. If you worry too much about success then the joy and pleasure this should bring starts to disappear and re-emerge as negative thoughts.

It was an interesting challenge to compile the images from such a short excursion and duration. Not a challenge I plan to do again. Maybe next year I may be able to undertake my original theme.

I hope that in the book you find a few enjoyable images and find the excursion interesting and maybe give you a few thoughts about how the ordinary may seem interesting depending on the view.

Niels Henriksen

Creativity Article and Candid Portraits

This week I came across a good article on the topic of creativity. This is something I try to write on and then only in specific areas. As far as I know there are no perfect formulae that all of a sudden will make you creative.

Being creative is mainly about doing. Doing things that help the creative ideas flow and at the same time reduce the interruptions or burdens of everyday life that wants you to be robotic. There are many people whose daily job it is to be creative and even these people I know have to practice at making the creative juices flow.

This linked article may seem a bit long at 49 pages, but I found the writing style enjoyable and with the added bonus of his comical drawings on the back of business cards, it increases the extra entertainment factor. There are many good ideas contained within and where there is a slant towards the advertising industry, it is relevant to photographers and other artists. I would encourage you to read it and pass it along to any others that you think might enjoy it.


Update: I inadvertently included the wrong blog as the source for the link. The article was from Pixelatedimage blog as the link can be found here and Chris Brogan is still a good read.

Chris Brogan’s blog is one of my regular reads. His blog deals with social media and community mainly at the corporate level but it is easy to extract material for our business and personal levels. I think it is important that being a photographer or any artist, that we explore more about business, people and customers.

The article I had originally planned was to deal with shooting completely black objects so now I have an article ready for next week. Feels good to be ahead.

I love this photo on many levels. First and foremost the expression of sheer wonder is what grabs you. If you take the time for a closer look you will see that red is the dominant colour, The red glasses, red chair and the pink bathing straps as well as the dark red in the background all help to re-enforce colour dominance. This is complimented with the green hat and also with its analogous colour of cyan in some of the background and with the reflection of water in her face and the lettering on the lens strap.


To many of my regular readers you are probably aware that most of my images are either landscape or inanimate objects and people rarely are the primary focus. This week I decided to show some of my pure people images.

In this image the colours on the shirt are balanced out with same colours in the background. In this shot I had the lions head on the background wall line up with the boys’ own wild main.

I had noticed the boy and his parents early in one of the rings around the street performers and when they started to leave I asked him and his parents if I might take a few shots. They were pleased by my offer.

A street party or event and this case both since it was a Buskers festival becomes a photo-rick area for getting lots of people in interesting images

The main focal point of this image is clearly the interaction between the 2 women obviously enjoying a good laugh. I removed the lower portion of the dining table as its clutter only detracted from the focal point. I also converted to B&W, as I did not want any background colours to lend the eye away. B&W does a good job of removing extraneous detail and clutter, especially when they are colorful



There are strong focal points for eye movement from first the eyes and then mouth, finger over to flower and then up to highlight on the top of head. I decided to leave in the tiny highlight on top of his head to ensure that you take in his whole portrait and take away from those intense eyes.

When I gave him my images of the evening’s event, both he and his wife enjoyed my images more than the professional wedding photographer.

While there is a pleasing smile, I really enjoy the brown tones.



Addiction Hint:

You know when you’re either addicted to photography or seriously challenged when you take photos of your own wedding. This was the case for me. During the actual ceremony I handed my camera to my son, but I took the before & after ceremony shots plus some group shots. This was an outdoor civil ceremony in the gardens and a fine hotel that night.



Niels Henriksen

Be Thankful for our Modern Cameras

Today I feel grateful that our modern cameras work so well that from a technical camera point-of-view it is quite simple to take very good images. I am also thankful that I have over the past few years taken a lot of photographs.

You may wonder as to why I am being so thankful. With my artistic endeavours some things work well like photography. With others like the exploration of oil painting, the paint does come out of the tube and when you mix 2 colours you get a new colour but that is as far as those parts that are doing well.

On the weekend I was trying to paint a street scene from one of my photographs and why do I always pick the hard to paint scenes. I hate being a raw beginner again but as far as I know there is no other way to start the journey.


The images in this article were all taken at the Jespherhus Gardens near Nykobing Mors, Denmark.

I darkened some of the green foliage on the top and bottom right to give a bit more emphasis to the lighter branch near the middle.

I have done some watercolour paintings and after awhile some were good enough to frame and sell. With watercolours it is very difficult to correct mistakes and I thought, well with oil paint I just paint over. What could be easier?

Well a lot of things. I was encountering difficulties between the vision of a great painting in my head and what was actually rendered in front of me. I had started this a while ago and wasn’t sure how to proceed next.

This image was fun to play with in Adobe Camera Raw as I adjusted the luminance and saturation sliders to bring out more of the colours.

So I mentally said to myself, “Stop beating yourself up.” Just paint and have fun. Learn from what happened even if it isn’t better than a kindergarten painter. Hey some of those children are good.

That’s what I did. In different parts of the painting I tried different t techniques. Not that these techniques support each other but to experiment and push the colours around.

Close-up of a very large cactus plant leaf.


That’s the fun part loading paint on the brush and pushing the colours around. Almost therapeutic but not great art.

The same learning approach can be applied to the camera. Don’t stress over the fact that your images aren’t hanging in some great gallery.


Have fun. Do try different approaches such as depth of field (DOF), slow or fast motion, various or strange angles. Then when looking at each image try to determine what parts you like best.

For other sections of the image try and figure out why its not working for you as this will give you insight for future shots for those things to avoid.

The back-lit leaf provides a very striking graphic pattern with the light and dark veins.

Once again the reason I am thankful for camera technology and a huge file base is that at times like this, when I don’t have enough time, I can go over some previous photographic events and with reasonable probability find some images that you find interesting.


I liked the Cyan colour tinge on some of the central leaves.

During one afternoon in a flower garden I was able to take a range of different plant compositions and because our cameras are so great now, it was relatively easy to have a few turn out well.

The plant has a very strong golden colour to the leaves and central flower cluster but I just couldn’t seem make it pop. When I converted to B&W the curly stamens now became more interesting.

All that is needed is an eye to see more or deeper than the grand vista. A mind that is inquisitive and willing to examine our perceptions of the everyday world and now just an off-the-counter camera that for the most part will take the great images that you see before you.

There are a few skills and techniques that will help you in modifying a scene through the camera settings when some parts need to be de-emphasised.

I hope that you found at least one image interesting.

Niels Henriksen