One of the fun things on Canon cameras, at least the ones I have, can’t speak for the newer mirrorless and such, is the ability to choose a monochrome setting for capturing images. AND one can set the camera to capture black and white or sepia (maybe more versions, but those are the ones I’m familiar with). Now, in this age of color photography, why would anyone in their right mind want to go back to black and white, sepia and such? There’s something special about the simplicity of a well captured monochrome image. They will never displace full color, of course, but then full color simply doesn’t always capture the mood either.
Yesterday I took the Rebel T1i out and tried to capture an image I’d imagined in my mind. Someone dumped a broken pot near the flowers that my wife and I have been tending in the park across from our house. And it was right next to a … begonia? A flowering plant. 😀 And I got to thinking, that’d make a nice “cover photo” for my FB page. But the Rebel simply didn’t get me the shot I wanted with the lens I wanted. The crop factor cropped the image and so I went back in and grabbed the Canon 6D full frame and attached the Fotodiox Pro AR-EOS adapter with the Vivitar 70-150 f3.8 Clsoe Focus lens and headed back out. This setup allowed me to catch the look I had in mind, but not quite right for the FB cover photo. So I pulled the image up in GIMP and flipped it horizontally, ending up with a reversed image like the old daguerreotype photos produced. Then into Corel Paint Shop Pro for a watermark and presto! A new cover photo.
But all this had me cogitating on the shot and how to “improve” it. To MY mind it was a perfect candidate for monochrome, but I eschew that kind of image editing on the PC in favor of producing it right in the camera. So this morning I headed back out, 6D in hand, to see what the camera could see. Shooting hand held in awkward positions doesn’t lend itself to sharp images, so the pot shots didn’t pan out. But that wasn’t evident until I got back to the PC and saw them on the large screen… <sigh> However, with camera in hand and the park nice and calm, no breeze, it was a matter of a few minutes to capture a few more images, using both the sepia and black and white settings on the camera. Eventually I may get back out there with a tripod and see if that picture in my head will make its way to the screen.
