Just how easy we have it with digital cameras and photoshop was brought home to me today.

My wife Vicky is doing a photography course at the Learning Connexion this term and is using film which she has to process themselves. Of course this means that her images are in black & white. She was supposed to produce a body of work on a theme and she chose “reflections”. While she is quite a good photographer she was struggling a little with seeing things in black & white.

After lunch we both decided to head outside and work on her project. It has rained most of the morning and we figured that the puddles that were likely to be formed on the  concrete sections at the Trentham racecourse would offer good possibilities.

I took along my digital and we worked slowly through the shots she wanted to take. She would estimate the camera settings she wanted to use. I would then put them into my camera and with it set to deliver a B&W image take a shot. If she was happy with the result she would then take a shot on the film camera. The only tricky thing we ran into was compensating for the crop sensor effect.

We then headed up to Akatawara Cemetery and obtained some reflections using the backs of some highly polished marble headstones.

What was a real pain was that when she was lining up a shot she would often tell me that she didn’t like something in the shot, and could I move it. This included rubbish bins, tables and chairs, and not to mention branches on trees. Shooting in digital we wouldn’t have bothered knowing that we could simply clone it out in photoshop.

The images below are a sample of the ones I took. Vicky’s film images came out good as well, even though some might say that the technique is slightly cheating.