What I Am Working On: Fiddling

This photo was taken at Menin Gate, Ypres Belgium.  It’s a massive WWI monument that has a Last Post ceremony every evening at 8pm:

ISO 500 18mm f/11 1/100 sec

Being that it was June, there was quite a bit of natural light after the ceremony. The light gave the monument a nice glow. I liked the color version of this photo, but was interested this week in creating a black and white version:

ISO 500 18mm f/11 1/100 sec

This edit has two layers to achieve the mix of black and white with red. On the black and white layer, I focused on bringing out detail like the names on the wall. On the layer where I was adding the red color back in, I also dropped the luminance slider of the reds, creating a muted tone that worked with the black and white of the rest of the image. Getting the colors and the black and white layers to where I wanted them and then blending them took quite a bit of fiddling. No formulas or rules here, just a do I like this better? how about now? kind of approach.

Do you like this particular interpretation? This is definitely a shot that I will be working with again to create a color version as well. Your comments are welcome below.

Cheers!

Added to Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge, Flower of Any Kind.

When It All Adds Up

A while back I blogged about this photo:

ISO 800 50mm f/13 1/160

Based on what I could find online, a few things like his name and date of birth didn’t seem to add up when you looked at this grave marker.  So I went back to the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial. The staff member who helped me was a bit surprised that I wasn’t researching a relative,but was more than happy to give me a hand in my research.  It ended up being pretty simple.  The Carlisle H. Reville whose grave I photographed, was Carlisle H. Reville Jr.  My search had been further complicated by the fact that the 1930 Census record was handwritten, and the later data entry spelled his first name wrong.

It’s easy to see why a mistake was made.

So, on the data entry portion of this page, he is listed as “Caulislo”, easy to see why.

In the course of my research I found out that Reville Sr. had served in WWI.  I also found out that Reville Jr. had first been buried at another cemetery but was moved here when this cemetery was established.  What I can’t find is a decent lead on the family, other than they were living in Pennsylvania in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  If you happen to know this family, I am more than happy to have them contact me if they would like a digital copy of the photo I have taken of their relative’s grave.

Since I was back at the cemetery, you know that I took some more pictures.  Here is one from that day:

The edited black and white version

I’ve edited this in Lightroom and using a black and white plug-in.  I’ll post the original below, but one of the first things I did while it was still a color version was to bring out detail in the shadows and increase the saturation in the blues and the greens.  It looks horrible in that state, but once it is converted to black and white it looks good again. Here is the original file:

The original

The subject is well suited to black and white I think.  I’ve included it in my portfolio at Picfair. Somehow the color version just seems to vivid for the subject matter.  What do you think?  Feel free to comment on my new photo or on the follow up from my older post.

Cheers!