Shooting Black & White

[mjamestx]

Hey gang, I have a question regarding B &W and the G2.

Im about to take a hiking trip during which i would like to experiment with some b & w shots.

How much control do I have over exposure and aperature? I know that I can use the B & W selection from the "palette" program option, but when I do it this way, I dont seem to have control over anything.

Forgive me but well.....being a guy - I havent read the manual ENTIRELY although i have read thru sections several times. I just cant seem to fix this one.

I just bought some accessories that include the Lensmate adapter, a Cokin filter holder, and a Red A003 filter. It seems that my pictures only get worse when shooting thru the red.....

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

~Matthew

[aravet]

True, you can't control anything. I got some really pics in this mode though.

The other option is to shoot in colour, and make it BW with PhotoShop. This way, you can even play with red/yellow/.. filters after taking the picture :

http://www.russellbrown.com/tips/moviesps/ColortoB&W.mov
http://www.russellbrown.com/tips/pdf/colortoB&W.pdf

[Jos Vromen]

I always use Photoshop. That means I take the pictures in the color mode and make changes, or make them black & white, in my computer. I think this works fine, and gives me the oppertunity to keep them in color when I change my mind.

[Kodack]

If you shoot in RAW format you will find it easy to convert to black and white in post processing.

I usually use photoshop to do this but it's not as simple as changing mode to greytone. True black and white film is more sensitive to green tones than color film.

I'm not sure how it is done on the camera but I suspect it is just discarding color information and preserving luminocity.

The best black and white quality is achieved by changing the image mode to "lab color" and then going to "channels" and selecting only the lightness channel.

The reason why black and white is more sensitive to green is that if you split a color image into red green and blue and look at each channel, green has the most detail and the least amount of noise. Red and blue have much less detail and the amount of noise is higher.

By doing this your pictures will more closely match a true black and white film like T-Max.

This is particularly evident if you look at the CCD the G2 uses. The color filters used on the CCD run GRGB etc instead of RGBRGB. That is 1 1/2 times more green sensitive pixels than red or blue.