Brand New Robins in Black and White

I’m pretty excited to have a robin’s nest right outside my kitchen window.  I had been tracking the nest for days and thrilled to see that two have hatched. In addition to taking color photos I was interested to see what these birds would look like in black and white:

ISO 800 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/400

At the time this photo was taken the babies had been hatched for at least 9 hours.  I had taken their picture earlier in the day and they were already bigger and had more feathers than my earlier shots.

I edited this photo in Photoshop.  I cropped the image then converted it to black and white, then I sharpened it.  Here is the original color version as it was straight out of the camera:

ISO 800 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/400

What do you think?  It is more common to see an image like this in color, but do you like the black and white treatment? Feel free to leave a comment below

I wrote this post in part as a response to the theme of “small subjects” over at Cee’s Black and White Challenge. I’m not sure if I would have thought to convert this image to black and white if I had not seen her challenge, so I’d like to thank her for the idea.

Cheers!

Coneflower in Black and White

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/2.8 1/125

This coneflower has had my attention for the last few days. Today I decided to shoot it in black and white.  Actually the original image is in color.  I used my Canon 50D with a 50mm lens to get this shot.  I also used my tripod.  There was a slight breeze, so I thought the tripod would help with any movement. When taking a picture like this I am often thinking about depth of field.  What should be in focus and what would I like to see blurred.  I settled on an f-stop of 2.8 because I decided I liked the petals in focus but not the stem.  I tried f/1.8 but the petals were to out of focus for my liking.  At f/7.1 the stem and some of the ground were in focus which ended up not being a very pretty picture.

I edited this photo in Photoshop.  I converted it to black and white using a red filter setting.  In addition to cropping, I also changed the contrast.

From there, I cropped it a bit differently to create a 5×7 card to put on my website.

This post was written in response to a black and white photo challenge that is hosted by Sonel, and I would like to thank her for the inspiration for creating this photo.

Thoughts? Comments? feel free to leave them below.

Cheers!