Caffe Vita show piece #8

This is the last image that is being shown at the Queen Anne Caffe Vita location. Stop by and see the prints in person if you are in the area!

The trunks in this image are so contrasty that some detail is lost in the highlights, but otherwise I'm fond of this image. The gauzy, white appearance of the foliage was intended to resemble the look of infrared film, which often renders living greenery very bright. Of course, I don't have an infrared digital camera; the effect is achieved by overdriving the green channel when converting the original color image to black and white.

This points out a major advantage of digital cameras for black and white photography: with film, the way in which each color is rendered into black and white is a characteristic of the film emulsion. Different films have different looks, and serious black an white photographers manipulate how different colors are rendered onto the film by using colored filters over their camera lens at the time of exposure.

A normal dSLR always captures a color image, which you can convert to black and white later by selectively mixing the red, white and blue channels. The ability to do this is like being able to apply any type of color filter to the image after the fact, instead of having to decide on-the-spot how the final image should look.