Way Past Its Prime

A year ago I wandered the yard, using my old and new Nikons to take pictures mostly of flowers. Daffodils, mainly; a few crocuses. And a couple pix of our long-expired Spirea branches, both obviously focus experiments. I posted one the next day, in color; here's the other pic, in black & white.

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Black & white's partly an attitude. Unlike my Cybershot, the D300 has a monochrome setting, so when I take a black & white photo using the big Nikon I see it as a black & white image in the camera's monitor. But the viewfinder's just a viewfinder, and what I see while I'm setting up the photograph is not monochrome. When I'm shooting monochrome I need to think about framing and contrast differently than when I shoot color, but my best camera gives me no assistance. But that was true with film, and I've long since made the appropriate mental adjustments.

Then I move the images to my Macbook Pro, where really strange things happen. I generally shoot RAW digital images, and in the Nikon NEF format b&w is just a flag in the file header restricted to the embedded JPG. Apple's OSX ignores that flag monochrome image, and immediately shows me the image in color. Photoshop Elements takes the same approach. Bibble Pro's method is quite odd: It momentarily shows me the photo in black and white, then converts it reverts to a color image. So my first post-processing step is to convert the photographs back to black and white. Bibble (now Corel After Shot Pro, though I've not upgraded) gives me a choice of methods, and my preferences have changed since last March.

Regardless: All this back-and-forth conversion completely destroys any notion that my black & whites are SOOC. Not that I really care; I've never pretended I don't process my pix.

For the record, both the spirea branch (above) and the daffodil (below in the comment) use Bibble Pro's bundled Andrea plugin filters intended to duplicate (imitate?) pix photographed on FujiFilm Neopan 400 and printed on Kodak Polymax II. It's a Bibble combination I use quite regularly. It's been so long since I did real darkroom work that I can't vouch for the "realism" of Andrea's imitations.

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This photograph is an outtake from my 2012 photo-a-day project, 366 Snaps.

Number of project photos taken: 14
Title of "roll:" Flowers
Other photos taken on 3/18/2012: I shot twelve pix--essentially the same ones--with the V1, and called that folder "Garden."