barns of iowa Untitled

have trouble deciding when to use color or B&W film.

This is a predominately monochrome image and does not need to be in black and white. It is too bad that there are a couple of conspicuous branches and plants in the foreground that detract from the fence and the barn. however they are difficult to get rid of short of cloning them out of the image.

Yes, it should be B&W. But the sky

is kind of a boring white; a red filter may

help tremendously.

 

There are two ways to improve this shot. They both involve time. To make it even colder and more isolated, wait for a heavy snow, and shoot so that the flakes are sharply visible between you and the barn.

 

The other way is wait for fall, then on a bright-blue sky morning or evening within 1 hour of sunrise or sunset (whichever puts the sun behind you) use a polarizing filter and really jack up the colors!

 

Ansel Adams took more than enough bleak and white pictures, so now we should all use color all the time (in my opinion)!

 

By the way... all your shots seem to be lacking in color. Are you scanning from glossy prints (like you should be)? Or are you using a film scanner to scan the negatives (in which case either your exposures are wrong or your lab is not developing your film correctly)?

 

If you're seeing subdued colors in your prints, try a different lab (the ones at Wal*Mart do reasonable work at a low price, surprisingly enough!) And remember - Glossy prints duplicate much better!

 

Finally, a UV filter might remove some of the low contrast in your scans.

 

Keep shootin', you're on the right track!

I don't think there would be a lot of benefit from this being black and white. Can always convert to B&W on the computer to get a good idea.

Very nice Andrew Wyeth watercolor feeling, bleak and sterile. I love Andrew Wyeth.

One thing in this portfolio is that all of the barn pictures are taken from approximately the same angle and distance, from the side of the road. Would try different angles and distances, from very close (with permission) to very far, laying down or from as high as you can safely get. I think you'll enjoy the results and it will be a lot of fun.

I disagree with the last comment that we should all be shooting in color. I found that shooting in B&W or at least with B&W in mind helps me pay better attention to composition of objects rather than relying on the color to make a shot nice. This can make your color shots better as well.

 

Keep having fun and enjoying your pictures, I've enjoyed them, too.

Even though it's the kind of subject I'd love to shoot B&W, I agree with Joe that the watercolor feeling makes the picture. I like it.

I just would adjust the composition a little bit by turning the camera a to the left, so you can have a complete view of the tree. But this is more a question of personal taste.

Ignore the comments saying you should have taken it differently--any differently, and it would lose its effect. IT is almost B&W, so lacking in colors is it. The only benefit to going with B&W would be if you had your own darkroom and could thus exercise more control over the image. The belief that color photos have to be wildly saturated is stupid. If an image looks good with almost no color saturation, then that's great.

Anyhoo, good job. Beautiful image. The only thing that I might have done differently would be to change the composition a little; but still, it is very nice.

I'd like to echo Michael Walter's comments. The lack of color is more striking because it's not a total lack of color, and therefore it holds one's interest.