Digital Compact for B&W

Most have a monochrome setting in the menus I think. Certainly my Leica Dlux 3 does. Usually though I shoot raw an and then decide if I think the pic is better in B&W in post-processing.

Alternatively, get hold of an old Leica M film camera and lens and use the real thing. Still several good B&W emulsions easily available.

quote:

Originally posted by Chris Kelly:

Alternatively, get hold of an old Leica M film camera and lens

Holy crap! "Old Leica M" (1960s) camera and lenses are bloody expensive! Are they cheap in the UK or something?

Get a secondhand film SLR - you can pick them up for a song these days. You can also pick up complete developing and enlarger set ups very cheaply too - if the prices here are anything to go by. You will get a much better print from B&W film. Remember, it's 'atmosphere' you're wanting to catch. B&W film, if you do your own printing, will give you an enormous range of over or underexposing of the negative to get more of what you want (or less) through good old dodging and burning. You will get velvety blacks and gorgeous ranges of tone that the digital format will not give you - either at exposure or printing. B&W has subtlety. Digital monotone is Compact Disc...

Oh, and beware of reciprocity failure.

Even the most basic photo-editing programs are likely to allow a colour digital snap to be switched to monochrome. The bigger issue is getting a good monochrome print, that is more to do with printers/paper/inks etc than the camera.

I'll slip in a quick plug for this book at this point-it includes digital monochrome. It is pretty technical though. Written by my brother so apols for the advert.

Bruce

That looks like a fascinating book. Thanks for the 'advert'...

Deane

I'll be frank, it goes way over my head. It is highly technical. He also designed/sells darkroom gizmos and software which I'm told are very clever. More info here.

B&W film processing and printing is far easier than most would think.

However, digital is the future so a good digital manipulation package must be the best way forward.

Hi, Have a look at the new Ricoh GX100!
It seems to be getting some good press, thinking of getting one myself!!
Good luck

Looks interesting, but I'm a bit confused as they are pricing it the same as the Ricoh GR.

quote:

Originally posted by Diode100:
I've recently taken to prowling the streets of Chelsea at night and have a hankering to take some old fashioned moody black & white photos of deserted streets & nighthawk types. Does anyone know if you can get one of these high tech miniture wonder digital compacts to record the image in B&W

The basic answer is no. Digital cameras have a colour filter in front of the sensor so they only take colour - there is no B&W digital camera outside of specialist ones used by astronomers (as far as i'm aware).

Saying that, taking a colour photo then desaturating it will give you a nice B&W image, and you have the option of applying filters before conversion, so you can reproduce the effect of using a red/orange filter for high contrast etc. Basically there is much room for fun. The downside is that you may find yourself tinkering more in photoshop than actually taking pictures.

As a canon DSLR user I recently got a canon film body to get do some B&W shooting. This is mainly for fun, but also for the low light capability of high speed B&W film (you can push Ilford delta 3200 up to silly speeds approaching ISO 50,000 for example). So the idea was i'd be able to get some shots in very low light. In addition since my 6 year old is getting interested in photography I thought we should do home development as it's a really good way of finding out how this stuff works. He's had fun with thermometers, measuring out chemicals, and timing developer/fixer and washes. All good stuff and the chemicals aren't very poisonous for B&W developing (you can tip them down the sink for example).

Here are some shots from last weekend - it was a dark and gloomy day, and the wind was up high so we had waves crashing against the shore. The quality isn't too good since I got a serious amount of spray on the camera but that I think adds to the look of the shots. The camera had trouble with autofocus because of the amount of water on the lens/in the air. These were shot by me, developed by my son (he's the one in the pictures) and scanned in at home on a kodak flatbed scanner with a film scanner thingy. 12 frames are scanned at a time so it's pretty quick to scan a 36 exposure (around 10 mins for the 12 frames, so 1/2 an hour for the film).

http://www.loftsoft.co.uk/pictures/marina/index.html

Cesare