1930's movie still look

[Asmodeus]

My daughter's curreently doing a stage performance of "Annie Get Your Gun" and I shot it from the audience last night. Took close to 300 shots, and they look like people doing a stage play. I thought that giving it the B&W look might help for some of the shots and think that it really pays off. I can proabbaly do a lot more processing on the RAW images (I shot the entire play with the 85 1.8 and the camera set at ISO 800), but with only conversion to B&W and resizing, this ismage looks pretty good to me. I'd love some suggestions for doing something with the 300 shots to give them some flavor.

http://www.supercharger.net/pictures/aggtest.jpg

[SWPhotoImaging]

Asmodeus,

I hope you don't mind, I took the liberty of playing with your photo a little.
I opened up the shadows a little, tried to adjust the exposure a little, then made it into a duotone. Most 1930's stills were more duotone than pure B&W, so I thought it would be appropriate.

Did you shoot this raw? If so, it's possible it contains more detail than shows here, due to the very dark shadows and hot highlights caused by stage lighting. A little time with curves might reveal a real nice image.

http://sdwike.smugmug.com/photos/30436213-L.jpg

[Asmodeus]

Steven -

Thanks for the suggestion. I shot in RAW; this is just the result of B&W conversion and resizing. I'll play with the images and see what I can come up with.

[PhotosGuy]

Most of those were shot with a 4X5 press cam, flash on cam, at small aperature & were very sharp. You might try pushing the sharpness limits up a bit.