Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2008/05/24
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]2008-05-24-15:47:40 Tina Manley: > Thanks, Mehrdad. Do you not like the brown tint to the BW? I > usually like a warmer tone for people but could do a totally grayscale, > too. If I may wade in... I must confess I almost never like B&W which has been obviously warmed up. You present a lot of your photos -- great photos, by the way -- particularly ones from Guatemala or Honduras, it seems -- in a tone so warm it pretty much has to be described as sepia. I haven't spoken up because, well, I don't want to be that guy; you know your personal preferences and your market. But my reaction (there are no absolute universals here, but *nearly* always) when I see something so heavily brownish-toned, is to be put off by it. It seems sentimentally gimmicky. For me (and perhaps just for me), it takes an exceptional image to be strong enough to get past the impediment of having a "look" I associate with a particular trick -- and sepia-toning and obvious IR photos tend to fall in those categories. Now, your photos are generally strong enough to bear the weight of the gimmick and still survive for me, and for others perhaps the tone is a plus. I just don't know. > http://www.pbase.com/tinamanley/image/97561062 > > That's with an Alien Skin Exposure 2, TriX 400 filter. No brown > tint, but it looks pretty sinister to me. What do you think? It does look a little sinister compared to, say, this one: http://www.pbase.com/tinamanley/image/97553687 ...but I don't put it down to the cooler tone. The contrast and shadow characteristics are all different, as well. In this one http://www.pbase.com/tinamanley/image/97561062 you have darker eyesockets, and different sculpting of facial features, due to the shadows' having been pulled closer to black, and, yes, he does look more implacable than kindly in this rendition. Then again, the other version's warmth is more subtle than many examples I've seen, and doesn't bug me -- it's more like a warm-tone paper than full-on sepia. I'm thinking that 97561062 is just fine, but if you can replicate the the contrast characteristics of 97561062 wiht a little cooler tone it'd be interesting to see, and more of an apples-to-apples comparison. -Jeff