Category Archives: Animal photography

Black and white image impact

The ability to take images in black and white is seen by many photographers as being more challenging than regular colour photography.

Many years ago you made the choice in-camera as to whether you were going to shoot in colour or black and white with the type of film you loaded into your camera.

Now, however, the choice can be made after the image is shot with post-processing and a wide variety of software to achieve the best results. My personal choice for converting to black and white is a combination of Google Nik Tools Silver EFX Pro and Adobe PhotoShop.

Here is an example of some images that have been converted from colour to black and white:
Cityscape | Canvas wall art | for sale | Leeds Black Prince statue against a dark sky Cityscape | Canvas wall art | for sale | Leeds Black Prince statue against a dark sky (black and white)

Landscape | Canvas wall art | Consumed by waves Landscape | Black and White canvas wall art | Consumed by waves

When this image was taken I didn’t particularly have a black and white image in mind, but after processing I noticed how the details in the colour from the rocks and water almost detracted from the image. I decided to put this image through the Google Nik Tools Silver EFX Pro plugin to see if a reduction in colours would improve the image. What do you think? You can leave your comments below, I would be interested to hear.

Landscape | Canvas wall art | Black and White | Staithes harbour

The above image I didn’t even produce in colour, as this was an example of something that just didn’t work in colour. The subtle colours in the concrete were completely lost in the grey slab, and the sky was such a colour that it brought the tone of the image down. Once converted to black and white the image took on a life of it’s own.

Black and white images seem to have more power and impact that their colour counterparts.

All of these images can be found in the galleries on this website, along with many other such images.

A trip to Białowieski park Naradowy to see European Bison (Zubr)

Recently I visited the Białowieski park Naradowy in Poland, a European Bison reservation.

Photographing animals is always challenging, they are unpredictable and never seem to stay still when you need them to!  However, I was looking forward to seeing European Bison “up close”, and taking photos of these animals that once roamed around Europe.

Bison are frequently associated with the open plains of America, but they actually also roamed around Europe in much the same way.

Photographing these beasts has it’s challenges, with being a dark brown fur set against the white snow your camera always wants to try and expose for the snow.  Despite having white snow around, the day that I arrived was overcast and grey, and the lighting wasn’t great, making shutter speed an issue.  Shooting with my Sony A99 and Minolta “beercan” 70-210mm f/4 lens meant that I couldn’t get as much light as I would have liked at low ISO, so I had to compensate by bumping the ISO to 200 to get shutter speeds at a reasonable rate.  In hindsight I should have bumped it to 400 to keep the shutter even faster, but this is the reason for this blog, you can learn from my mistakes!

Exposing for detail in the dark brown fur was always top priority, creating good contrast will be important in post-processing to give these creatures the rugged look that they have.  The last thing I wanted was to lose detail and make it look like they have a fluffy coat!

To achieve this I used the exposure compensation on my camera to add a couple of stops of exposure to make sure the shadows and darker part of the image still had detail.  The exposure compensation setting on your camera enables you to ‘override’ your cameras guess at exposure that it has measured, and make the image lighter or darker (depending on what the situation is) than the camera has measured. The trick is to balance the details in the shadows and dark fur with the white snow, making sure that the snow is not ‘blown out’ to a complete white, and there is still shadows and greys within the snow.

Hopefully this post has given some food for thought and has been of some use to you, leave a comment below, let me know if you would like to hear anything else about the image.

Canvas wall art | for sale | Zubr in Bialowieski Park Narodowy in Poland