Digital BW, The Print

Thank you Tony. 
I do only digital. My current camera is Nikon D700 with Nikon 17-35mm lens. I use bracketing shooting 3 times with 1 stop difference in exposure using evaluative metering. I shoot in uncompressed raw.

I don't do any dodging and burning. If I get blown highlights or dark shadows I will try to save the image first in Lightroom using 'recovery' slider to save highlights and 'fill light' and 'blacks' to open shadows. I may also use brush for local changes.

If it's still not enough I will take my bracketing shots to Photoshop and join them as layers in one image using layer masks. This way I can use highlights from underexposed image and shadows from overexposed image.
It gives much better quality than dodging and burning because if highlights are blown there is just no information captured and dodging will give you just gray area. And if you burn dark shadows they will have a lot of noise and not enough details.

Tony, at this point there is no question you can get beautiful images with digital camera, just make sure you have a good camera and lens and doing all technical stuff right: exposure, focusing, ISO.

One more advise: shoot in color - not in black and white. Then in Lightroom after converting to b&w you can use color sliders to adjust tones of different colors. This is very powerful tool, you can make local changes without selections. And this tool has incredible range because it works on raw data. It makes it also unnecessary to use filters while shooting - you can always darken the sky with blue slider (if it has enough blue in it) or lighten the leaves with 'green' slider. 

So Tony, there are no secrets to good digital pictures, just hard work, we have to learn to use strong points of digital and to find our way around weak points, develop a workflow specific to our needs.

I hope this helps. If you have more questions please contact me either on the group or directly.

Jacob Mann
http://www.photo3dart.com



--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Tony Wells" <oaksfield@...> wrote:
>
> Hello Jacob,
> 
> While I have been following this thread with interest, I would like to take the opportunity to say how much I enjoyed perusing YOUR site, as well as Mr Berts'! As you seem to have gotten the exposure metering for B&W spot on, without resorting to the heavy dodging and burning so obvious on other B&W photographs, do you convert digital photographs to B&W, adjusting the exposure through the use of the histogram which you mention both here and previous posts, or scan in B&W films or prints, either before or after dodging and burning to produce a Fine Print though please? Although being a "soot and white wash" man, I am still striving to produce a GOOD (rather than acceptable) digital B&W print from a digital camera, so find myself still using one of my film cameras and scanning the negatives in, as I mentioned in one of my earlier posts!
> 
> TonyW.
> 
> 
> 
>   ----- Original Message ----- 
>   From: Jacob 
>   To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com 
>   Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 2:08 PM
>   Subject: [Digital BW] Re: photos by Jean-Michel Berts
> 
> 
>     
> 
> 
>   I've spent last days trying to figure out secret of Mr. Berts (by the way pictures of Ansel Adams have similar quality).
>   First of all - it's not dynamic range. If anything he uses smaller dynamic range then I do, only the left part of it, no clipped pixels.
>   He actually uses all dynamic range on the left (dark tones) very carefully approaching the edge without loosing dark pixels. And he uses right part very little so his pictures don't have a lot of light tones.
>   Zone 10 he may not use at all (the lightest tones), so he doesn't use all dynamic range.
>   I think what make his pictures are amazing details in the black. He uses big camera and tripod, low grain film and long exposure, exposed by shadow and under developed. This all gives amazing resolution in the shadows. 
>   We can also use tripod if situation permits, low ISO but avoid long exposures. What we also can do is try different plugins to enhance details. One of them was mentioned in this thread - lucis. 
>   Yes it may work. After the picture is prepped in Lightroom I've exported it on PS3 and enhanced details with lucis. The picture got very nice details in blacks looking much nicer.
>   So may be this is it?
>   We shoot picture exposing by shadows which I believe moves histogram to the right (which is common technique because the right side of the histogram preserves more details). 
>   In Lightroom we move histogram to the left, usually I add fill light and darks and clarity, convert to black and white, adjust colors as needed
>   Export to PS3 and add details with lucis - very carefuly
>   Print without loosing details in the shadows
> 
>   Jacob Mann
>   http://www.photo3dart.com
> 
> 
> 
>   
> 
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>