shades of gray

[laurenmarciano]

I've taken some pretty decent shots with my Rebel, but one thing that bothers me about my B&W photography is that there is very little range of black, gray and white. Just from looking at the pictures I would say it is because there is too much light - there are strong blacks and whites but very little in-between to make for a classic-looking B&W. Aisde from basic apeture settings, any ideas?

[gummyb]

You need to do a lot of processing in photoshop. Not just a straight convert to B&W. If you had your camera setting to B&W you'll still need to do "the ansel adam darkroom thing" in photoshop.

[sheila]

I would shoot in high res colour (even better, shoot RAW) and convert to black and white using filters such as can be found at Fred Miranda - http://www.fredmiranda.com/software or if you want some mono with a bit of oomph, try the freebie filter at http://www.optikvervelabs.com

You will need Photoshop to use any of these filters.

Cheers
Sheila

My mono gallery: http://www.pbase.com/sheila/bw

[dang]

You might try lowering your "in camera" contrast to improve tone range. From your description, it sounds you have it set higher than needed. If it's still at factory settings, they'll be higher than a 10, 20 or 30D. I'd also try shooting 3/4 to 1 stop under exposure for better detail. This should help keep detail in your highlights. You can always increase contrast in processing.

[mattmyles06]

It's all about the lighting and exposure.

Here are three examples, crop and resize in PS. otherwise right out of the camera (350D) using the monochrome setting:

(there was a fine mist that morning which also helped)

[alain_lestrade]

Lauren,

I've gone to your galleries, specially B/W and the problem you mentioned is not so important. Your B/W pictures seem quite good in terms of tonal values. Actually, I think you have a good taste for composition.

Peronnally, I try my best specially in B/W. I use Adobe Lightroom (LR) and RAW format. Please, see the results here:

http://www.pbase.com/alain_lestrade/galleries

LR allows great results for the control of tonal values, particularly thanks to its greyscale mixer. The challenge is then, to control the chroma noise.

Cheers,

Alain.

[jypsee]

because the rebel doesn't really have spot metering and that contributes to the lack of tones that it can recognise; here's a photo I made today (thinking of this thread, but also wanting to photograph my new toy)

Canon EOS 5D ,Tamron SP AF 28-75mm f/2.8 XR Di LD (IF)
1/60s f/2.8 at 75.0mm iso320

I spot metered the grey knob on the ballhead so that all the other tones would fall into place. With the 300D, the best you can do is to switch to manual mode and use the center weighted average metering to read your scene and then adjust your settings as you wish to render your tones. The 300D also has partial metering, but it only kicks in when you press the AE lock on your camera after you half press the shutter button. (see page 84 of your manual) In backlit situations such as I used with the above subject, you may want to select shutter priority in order to have control of your aperture without a convoluted messing around with the exposure compensatiun button. By selecting your shutter speed you can at least be sure that your photo will be in focus and lessen camera shake; no need to select shutter priority if you put the camera on a tripod and don't need to worry about camera shake.
Here's a photo of the same subject with the same lens made with the 300D in shutter priority mode and AE lock button activated to get the partial metering activeated

Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel
1/80s f/2.8 at 75.0mm iso400

The photo has less tonality than the photo made with the 5D which has spot metering. It's also affected by the 1.6FOV crop which contributes to pixel pitch, DOF, etc.