Aamir Zakaria Photography

Been a while…

Boy, it’s been quite a while since my last post.   I’ve been busy with var­i­ous projects, and also trav­el­ing a lot.

My lat­est upload is “Our Menu, 6 pm.”

I took this in March of 2013, and God knows where I took it.  It may have been at a silent retreat I was attend­ing.  It’s def­i­nite­ly a depar­ture from my ear­li­er land­scapes and cityscapes.  I find myself branch­ing out more and more, and with that comes an artist’s uncer­tain­ty.   It’s easy to see why a beau­ti­ful land­scape might cap­ture some­one’s eye, but a more abstract piece like this might lead the view­er to ques­tion my tal­ent, aes­thet­ics, san­i­ty, or all three.

Any­way, I like it, and that’s what mat­ters most.   I find myself work­ing with black and white more and more.   In dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy, my first black and white rev­e­la­tion was that I could turn a col­or pho­to­graph to a black and white one with the flip of a dig­i­tal switch.  Now that I’m work­ing in this medi­um more and more, I’m learn­ing more about the sub­tleties of black and white.

For exam­ple, here’s the orig­i­nal shot:

I was able to enhance the “white­ness” of my final image by sat­u­rat­ing the yel­lows and oranges dur­ing the con­ver­sion process.   The com­put­er still needs to know how to con­vert each col­or into which shade of gray, so you have a lot of con­trol over that con­ver­sion process by manip­u­lat­ing the col­ors in the orig­i­nal col­or image.

This is the rea­son why, in the dig­i­tal age, there’s no rea­son to set your cam­era set­tings to black and white (unless you’re shoot­ing RAW, which I hope you are, in which case it does­n’t mat­ter).   By leav­ing the orig­i­nal image in col­or, you have a vast amount of con­trol  over what the final B&W pho­to will look like.   This is yet anoth­er advan­tage of shoot­ing dig­i­tal over film.   I won­der what Ansel Adams would have done with dig­i­tal technology.