Shooting B&W

['Daniel']

Also I don't know about the 20D but the screen on the 350D is pretty unreliable to show you what the image will look like in a computer as the brightness of the scren changes dramatically depending on the anggle you hold it at so the histogram gives you an idea thats none perspective visual if that makes sense.

 

[Unimaxium]

Sometimes a scene will have a wider exposure range that what can be captured, and digital has less range that film. The recommendation for film is usually to lean towards overexposure. With digital, the opposite is true. It's easy to blow out the highlights (make them pure white), and once that happens, there's no info there to recover them.

My suggestion would be to expose for the bright areas, and then hope you can pull shadow detail out in software. My preference is also to shoot in color and then convert in PS. This gives you a lot more control.

Do you have an example to post, both before and after you processed? We might be able to make suggestions based on that.

Actually, I'd argue that it's the opposite. There's this interesting article over at Luminous-Landscape.com that explains why with digital you should tend to "expose right" as the author calls it, referring to keeping the majority of your tones towards the light side of the histogram. The reason he gives is because digital cameras have the ability to capture more distinct shades in bright areas than in dark areas. You can read it all here.

Also I believe Ansel Adams (who was of course a film guy lol) used to say that one should "expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights." This sounds like the opposite of "exposing right".

From my own personal experience I find that with slide film overexposure is much uglier than underexposure, but is just as hard to recover from. I also believe dense negatives are harder to work with than thin ones. My best-exposed shots have always come from B&W negs that looked thinner than I wanted when I first took them out of the developing tank.

So I would say that with film underexposure is better than overexposure, and from what I've read about digital that brighter exposures are better than darker exposures.

 

[markc]

Hm. I may have brain-farted there, but I'll have to think about it later. Having some recall problems.

I do know that it's rather easy to blow out highlights on digital, like it is with slides, so you have to be very careful on the upper end.

 

[LWW]

Here is #102. I darkened up the trees in the distance which led to a little more shadowing than ideal. I also cropped out the roadsign pole and the road.

LWW

 

[LWW]

Here I tried to give a sundown/evening look to it. Not much sky to work with.

LWW

 

[LWW]

Here I got a little abstract.

LWW

 

[LWW]

This is on #1001, and another try to make both extremes of brightness/contrast play nice.

LWW

 

[LWW]

This is another try at an evening/end of the day look.

LWW

 

[LWW]

And another surreal view.

LWW

 

[LWW]

None of my changes are really difficult from your original. I took maybe 10 minutes to do all 6.

With a digidarkroom play till your heart's content. Not to dog anybody, but some people do get too hooked up on the math IMHO. I don't know exactly what a histogram does or is to be honest. I do know what I like in a look.

My digidarkroom is nothing elaborate, an old copy of Adobe Photo Deluxe...which I understand is similar to elements.

Play with it...you will learn quick what does what and what affect a certain change will make.

It's photography...enjoy.

BTW if I remember my math on this digital can record 10 stops of brightness difference in 1 picture which means the brightest can be no brighter than 128X the darkest part of the scene from which you want detail. B&W film gives around 12 stops difference, which means you can have 4,096X brightness difference...or 32X the difference digital allows.

LWW

 

[zoom4267]

Thanks all for the feed back. i really appreciate it