Monochrome Madness

Well, I am suffering from a bout of Monochrome Madness. It’s an auto-exposure deficiency that requires adjusting my in-camera settings and reducing my appetite to 16 grays. However, it’s not as bad as it sounds.

I follow an amazing photography blog called “Photo a Day” that had some great black and white presets for the Fujifilm X100F. I tried them out on my X-T20 with the Opteka 28mm f/2.8 lens I snagged last week. I plan to write a bit more about the Opteka after I put it through the paces, but so far it has been a fantastic lens for the price.

These first two shots aren’t totally representative of the aforementioned presets; I did some darkening and masking in Lightroom to bring out the clouds in the window and darken the sky above the light bulb. The next few images are straight out of the camera. The settings, for those interested:

• ACROS + R
• Highlights 0
• Shadows 0
• Sharpness -1
• Noise Reduction -4

Disclaimer, I should have set that Sharpness to +1. Also, I like grain (noise) so I disable Noise Reduction and shoot Auto-ISO 200-6400.

Out of the camera the shots are beautiful, but I had a vision for the first two shots that I knew would take some tweaking in Lightroom. I was also encouraged a bit watching an interview with Ansel Adams. He said something that resonated with me, and likely many photographers:

“In actuality, the negative is like the composer’s score. All the information is there, and then the print is the performance.” -Ansel Adams