“Wait, monochrome?” you say, “As in, black and white? Al, you fucking moron, fall is the time to exploit the colors, not eliminate them entirely. What, are you trying to be avant-garde or poetically ironic or something equally spastic?”
Which hurts, I admit it, even when I wrote it myself. But I saw the possibilities of some of these, which worked better than most of what I’ve shot in the past several months for converting, so here we are. Now try to be nice.
By converting this one, it almost says “moonlight” better than the original. This is channel clipping again, just the Red channel. If you haven’t tried this, you should – some pics just look blasé, while others pop up with something entirely new.
This one wasn’t part of the original lineup, but as I was doing these, I went back through recent pics for some candidates. Most of them didn’t work that well, but this one converted nicely, using only the Blue channel this time; most times Blue is the least interesting, often grainy, but it brought out the mauve chrysanthemum blossom well. The fraternal potter wasp (Eumenes fraternus) was already monochrome anyway.
An insert here, two that have been sitting in my folder for nearly a year – I just never posted them. But this is a view of The Bayou in winter, taken from the best vantage that I could reach by foot (so far, anyway):
Just the Blue channel again. I could have tweaked contrast to improve this one, but there was a reason that I didn’t, which is, this is the full color version:
The cypress had all shed their needles, and the Spanish moss never has much color anyway, and facing south (my only choice) made the sky more washed out. In fact, I think it had more color than it might have because that’s ice you’re seeing, reflecting the sky color even better. What I should do is convert the two images into an animated gif (pronounced, “JREY-skayl“) that slowly morphs between the two, and say nothing about it, just to make people think their vision is going wonky.
This one, from October’s month-end abstracts, is simply a conversion to greyscale – I tried channel clipping, but each of them left something to be desired. I like how the eye almost produces a pure black and thus suggests the exposure was close to proper anyway, while the rest is a light pencil sketch. Very avant-garde.
The Green channel this time. Funny thing about this one: I had an original cropping for the color version all set to go, but then when I converted to greyscale, I realized it looked better with a slightly different crop – and so did the color version, so that’s what I ended up using. Hilarious, right?
I remarked on the high contrast of this one despite the low contrast lighting conditions, and this is what prompted the monochrome experiments in the first place. This is one of those minor refinements, in that it’s a combination of the Green and Blue channels, making the Green (which sits ‘above’ the Blue) transparent to a degree – either one by themselves wasn’t quite right. Now it’s even more surreal and seems far more like elaborate digital editing, which might work against it standing alone – we know what the color version looks like, so we know it’s just a trick of the light and surface tension, but without that it may seem too artificial. Still, I like the eye-bending aspect of it.
And finally,
I did this one some time back, soon after the original posted, but had nothing else to go with it, and just remembered it now. For saying that the Blue channel is often a poor choice, here it is again – we’ve actually had more of these in this batch than the other channels, so maybe don’t listen to me. I know, “Way ahead of you, Al,” shut up. But seriously, go do your own experiments, see what you produce – it’s healthy and appealing to the appropriate sex, and how many things can claim that nowadays?