I’ve been enjoying the work of Jean-Michel Berts who enhances his monochrome images with the selective use of light. He sells two video tutorials that walk through his approach.
I went back to this earlier image of mine – shot originally with my iPhone 5 – and added just a bit of Berts’ technique in Photoshop CC. The original version is below.
Earlier this year we began getting a weekly delivery of fresh farm produce from a local grower in the hills west of Woodside. It’s been a delight to have this fresh produce each week!
This weekend, we took a short drive over to see the farm and to meet the couple that cultivates this wonderful farm.
I took my Fujifilm X100S along – along with my new iPhone 5s – and snapped a few pictures while we were there. The image above is from the X100S – it’s a shot of the pond that is spring fed and used for the irrigation of the five acre farm. A beautiful spot on a Saturday morning!
The two shots below are different interpretations of an image I shot with my iPhone 5s just to the right of the earlier image. The images were edited using iPhone applications in the phone and then uploaded to Flickr. I like both of them – but the second one – with the more antique look and toning – is my preference.
All of these images are very peaceful to me. They delight in a most subtle but satisfying way. Hope you like them too!
This image is of one of the streetcars in the car barn at the Western Railway Museum just outside of Fairfield, California.
I shot this image using my iPhone 5 – and post-processed it totally on the iPhone using the Dramatic B&W application. When I took the shot, I got lucky to be able to light up the headlamp of the camp – thanks to a reflection of natural light coming in from the far right. That light in the headlamp makes this shot – without it, it’d just be another streetcar image!
Doug Kaye and I got to San Diego thinking we might have some opportunities to shoot while we attended Dan Margulis’ workshop. As it turned out, Dan is quite a taskmaster – in a very good way – and we only had our first evening to head out for shooting.
We headed first to Old Town – and I caught this skater as he zoomed past while we were sitting on a bench.
Last Sunday we headed to the Rockridge district of Oakland. I brought my Fujifilm X100S along and caught a couple of interesting street shots – include this one.
Over the summer, I worked on a personal project that involved going back through my images from our visit to Havana, Cuba in late January of this year and creating a new portfolio of portraits – cropped to square format. I worked on a few images each week – ultimately resulting in a portfolio of twenty portraits that I titled “Faces of Cuba”.
I recently assembled these images in a Blurb book – also in square format – 7×7 inches in size. I used Lightroom 5’s book publishing module to edit the book and send it to Blurb for printing. I was very pleased with the result – this “proof edition” of Faces of Cuba!
You can see the full portfolio here.
Earlier this week, I finished up a print version of my Faces of Cuba portfolio and sent it off to Blurb for printing. This was an end of summer personal project where I went back through my photos from our trip to Cuba in late January and tried to create twenty portraits that captured some of the moods we experienced there. These kinds of projects help keep me fresh – and, when I can’t be out shooting a lot of new things, then working on photos from my existing archive is very therapeutic!
About half way through that Faces of Cuba project, I began experimenting with a couple of the black and white film emulations in the VSCO Film presets. For most of them, I settled on the Agfa Scala 200 that in VSCO Film 04. I love the look it has – although I do back down the grain.
This is a tightly cropped (and, thus, perhaps not as sharp) image from our very first afternoon upon arrival in Havana. After briefly settling out stuff in the hotel, we headed down the Prado, the main street just next to the hotel and we quickly felt immersed in Cuba! I love his look – “attitude” I called it – and think it looks great as a monochrome with some subtle platinum toning in the shadows. He didn’t make it into the first print edition of Faces of Cuba – but perhaps he’ll be in the second edition!
Here’s another image from the afternoon of our first full day in Havana. The light was streaming in through high windows into the public market warehouse space. It provided some striking contrast for us.
I believe this particular vendor was cracking nuts and using that screen to separate the nutmeat from the rest. But, to me, he’s always been “The Boss”.
He’s part of my Faces of Cuba portfolio. Shot with a Nikon D600. Post-processed using Lightroom 5, VSCO File 04, and Photoshop CC.
On the afternoon of our first full day in Havana – a day that was chock full of activities – including the 6:15 AM “Dawn Patrol” – we headed to one of the public markets in Havana. It was a very interesting place to shoot – with some very cooperative subjects and some who didn’t want us to come close.
This woman caught my eye – she was selling vegetables at the market and was watching what we were doing. I tried a bit of that weird shorthand – holding up my camera and giving her a questioning look. She said it was fine to take her picture. She was a beautiful subject – and the light inside the market was perfect for this shot.
She is part of my Faces of Cuba portfolio. Shot with a Nikon D600. Post-processed using Lightroom 5, VSCO Film 04, and Photoshop CC.
On our second full day in Havana we visited Taller Experimental de Gráfica de La Habana and spoke with several graphic artists. This particular shot is the last in a series of the printmaker pulling this print through a very large press – and then holding it up for all of us to see.
The Printmaker is part of my Faces of Cuba portfolio. Shot with a Nikon D600. Post-processed using Lightroom 5, VSCO 04 Film, and Photoshop CC.