I made a wrong turn while taking a shortcut, and found this bridge I never knew was here -- only 8 miles from home! It seemed to be horribly underexposed, but the scanner was able to find shadow detail. I also shot it in chrome 6x6. I'll post that tomorrow...
In any case, I'll have to visit this place in the Fall when the leaves turn!
It seems to me that somehow, both the verticals and the horizon look better in the other version. The colour does let the bridge stand out better than in this shot, but nevertheless, I think the bridge is a good subject for B&W photography.
I took the colour image and converted it to greyscale by using the channel mixer with red as the strongest element. I guess you can get the same effect on film by using a red filter. What it does is separate the bridge from the background nicely. I increased the contrast, dodged the deep shadow area on the right a bit, and burned all the rest of the growth, and the stone wall on the left, all of which you can do in the darkroom.
It's far from perfect but I just wanted to show that if you can get the bridge to have lighter tones, that foreground-background separation that works in the colour version will work for the B&W version as well.
Oh, and the shadows inside the bridge seem to show more detail than in this first upload, so that's an improvement as well.
The color image is here: http://www.usefilm.com/image/195446.html -- please let me know which you like better. As to the vertical lines, I struggled with the fact the bridge was leaning to the right, and decided to keep the camera perfectly level... Perhaps it was better to do what my eye did for me on the handheld color image... line up the verticals of the bridge, and let the horizon tilt. It can't be seen, but the bridge can. Thanks!!!
IMO you should try a different angle so that you don't have that washed out patch of sky in the top left corner; and/or shoot it on a cloudy day so that the sky shows some cloud texture. Also, the vertical lines are leaning towards the right, so you may want to rotate the camera a bit to get rid of this effect.
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{K:24381} 8/23/2003
