Black and White Treatment

I've spent some portions of my time shooting limiting myself to black and white for sake of the effects.  One of the images from Getty really worked out well for a bit of levels enhancement and a black and white treatment:

Before

The image is low-contrast and relatively blurry in the original form—manually focusing at 400mm is tough given how thin the depth of field is.  The birds on the posts are generally sharp, and the ones flying aren't.

The levels enhancement helps the contrast some, but it makes the image a little over done.  Fortunately, a black and white treatment really helps:

After

All in all, I think it's quite an improvement—and the print of the black and white version was pretty terrific.  One of my recent favorites, to be sure.

Compositionally it could probably be better (the dark spot in the upper left is a small overhang from a tree a few feet away), but it does handle rule of thirds fairly nicely I suppose.  The blurriness of the image is actually somewhat attractive here, as it helps to distinguish the middle third from the bottom one.  I'm undecided about whether the top third is compositionally useful or not—if not, a crop might serve better to fill things more adequately.

Gettysburg

Shooting with the 400 f/5.6.

Took a trip to Gettysburg with friends this past weekend and really enjoyed a good shoot.  The weather wasn't too good, and my inexperience with shooting film really showed, as I was unable to overcome some minor issues with the film feeder and probably lost two and a half rolls of film on the day.

My favorite shot that I took was from inside of a church at a Lutheran seminary there:

85mm f/1.8 @ f/2, 1/100s, ISO 1600

The inside of the church was pretty dark but afforded some interesting views through the stained glass.  I'd like to do some distortion correction, but I liked this one also:

24mm f/2.8 @ f/2.8, 1/60s, ISO 800

The 400 did not see as much action, but I did take a few shots on the way to Spangler House:

400mm f/5.6 @ f/5.6, 1/3200s, ISO 1000

400mm f/5.6 @ f/5.6, 1/800s, ISO 1000

400mm f/5.6 @ 5.6, 1/1250s, ISO 1000

All in all, a fun trip with good company.  Hopefully there will be more.  Two trips a year is not enough!