Life through a lens

In these days I have no time to improve my photographic technique, but I'm experimenting black and white (hereafter B&W) photography. I have to admit that I prefer colored pictures, but actually even B&W could be funny.

Indeed, as in colored photos, even with B&W you have to take enough time in the digital darkroom. Obviously, the parameters you have to modify are less than the previous cases, but you still obtain nice results.

Here I post two photos (larger versions can be found by clicking on the thumbnails, re-directing you to relative Flickr pages) that have been corrected in some parts with different editing programs.

In the first photo there is something like a barbed wire on a blurred fields and hills background. At the moment of the shot, the problem I had in mind was that of highlighting the wire but, at the same time, not to loose too many details of the background. There was another problem: it has just started to rain and I had not the time to adjust properly the settings of my camera. So I shot in "P" program (something like a semi-authomatic mode) in JPEG with only the B&W setting selected. The result is amazing: the wire is visible and you still can distinguish the background (I mean: you see the blurred hills and fileds, but that's enough to contextualise the wire). At home, I imported that picture in Apple's iPhoto and adjusted it working on sharpness, color tone, contrast and levels. The result is this.

I hope you like those first attempts in taking B&W photos. Let me know what you think about that.