Sidelight is a wonderful thing
Betwixt and between, that’s what I am. I like traditional darkroom work. I like the look of a traditional print. Heck, I’m in the process of setting up a traditional darkroom in my basement. But, in truth, I’m worried that I won’t be able to replicate the facility with which I manipulate my digital images. And, yeah, the ease with which they come out of my printer.
I’ve pretty much concluded lately that I like HP5 more than I like Tri-X. Tri-X is nice, no complaints, but there are some qualities that HP5 possesses that I do love. There’s sort of a blue-ish quality to the mid-tones that is quite beautiful.
The image alongside this post was shot with my trusty 10D, transformed into a black and white image inside of Capture One using custom profiles, and then given HP5 tonality and ‘grain’ in DXO Film Pack.
It;s an image that caught my eye when I was going through my Lightroom collection and seemed to have some life, so I worked a little on it.
There certainly is some attraction to shooting in color, then processing it to get the look you want.
A poster on APUG mentioned how his 10D gave him nice black&white, so I’ve been trying it a bit. It does seem to deliver nice B&W. The question is where do you do the processing? In Capture One, in Lightroom, in LightZone, in DXO film pack. Yikes.
