Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I’ve been trying out black-and-white conversion of photos to see what I can get. I think images of animals with high contrast patterns like this corn snake and Argiope look pretty nice in B&W. I posted the color original of the corn head photo for comparison.

All photos taken with a D70 and Sigma 105mm macro lens, hand held. B&W conversions done with Photoshop channel mixer function.

f/7.1, 1/160 second, on camera SB800 flash.

Same as above without B&W conversion

f/20, 1/125s, SB800 on camera bounced off white surface 2 feet above subject

f/4, 1/200s, no flash

Comments welcomed.

Cheers,
WK

I'm new to this forum but should really be here more often than the boa forum I hang out in.

Those are some great B/W shots! I too think they can add a lot to a photo.

This one isn't a black and white but one of my favorite shots. It was taken in AZ with a nikon, not sure of the exact camera. I had it on macro so I was close to the guy, not without help close by though.

Rich

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bigdnutz
1.2 Suriname
1.0 Venezuelan

Wow, that's a beautiful portrait of that rattler (looks like a molossus?). Exposure, focus and composition are dead on. Well done! Was it a film camera or digital?

Thanks for the comments on my set of pics. Much appreciated.

Cheers,
WK

Yeah, it was a digital. I took about 15 pictures while that things was still for me. This was my favorite. I'm always a little nervous when photographing hots. And yes, it was a molossus. I was in South Eastern AZ for a month last summer doing some research. It was a herpers dream. We saw just about everything but a coral snake.

This is another pic from that trip. These horny toads crack me up. They were great to photograph because they are hoping you can't see them so you can get about 4 inches from their face, or closer if careful.

Great stuff

Rich

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bigdnutz
1.2 Suriname
1.0 Venezuelan

That one seemed to look a little grainy. Probably a problem with resizing. This one should look better.

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bigdnutz
1.2 Suriname
1.0 Venezuelan

Could you post the shutter speed, F stop and focal lenght, please? This should be saved in the file, and can be found in Windows Explorer by right clicking on the file, and select the "Summary" tab.
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Lamar, Debbie, Nathaniel and Iggi :>~

Interesting lizards. As a point of interest, there is a population of these (or at least, there was when I was a kid) among the dunes on the beaches at Isle of Palms and Sullivans Island in SC. The story is that Civil War soldiers brought them in their pockets as pets.

Cheers,
WK

I agree that black and white is a good medium for texture and details. The out of focus orange area above the snake's eye is distracting in color, because it is so bright orange. In black and white, it does not distract from the eye of the snake, and the patterns on the scales. In Photoshop, I use ENHANCE>REMOVE COLOR to go to black and white, to keep the file as an RGB, in case I want to add color to it later. In this photo, I turned a color photo into a duotone after I removed the color with ENHANCE>ADJUST COLOR>HUE/SATURATION, and clicked on the colorize box. The photo was taken with a Sony DSC F828, zoom set at 35mm, f/4, 1/200 sec. ISO 64. On camera flash used for fill.

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Lamar, Debbie, Nathaniel and Iggi :>~

Thanks for the comments. I'll have to try your method in Photoshop to see what I can get. Do you have the unmodified version of this photo? It would help to see a comparison so I can get a better idea of the effect of what you did. This software has so many dang functions. I think I'm aware of maybe 5% of them at the most.

That's a big iguana. The pattern on it's body is really interesting. Does it really look like that, or is it moire artifact? You may already know this, but moire occurs in some digital images when a fine pattern in the subject (like this iguana's scale lines, perhaps) interacts with the pattern on the sensor chip, resulting in a third, artificial pattern.

See the link below to see an illustration of moire effect. The interplay of the two circular patterns produces a third artificial pattern.

Cheers,
WK
The Moire Effect

Thanks . That's our 4 1/2 year old female iguana, Iggi, on my wife. She has about 2 more years to grow! LOL! The moire pattern you see is a function of the software fitting the detail into a 800 pixel screen size. The Sony DSC F828 is an 8 Megapixel camera, and even with jpeg compression, the files are 3.5 Meg. I have to downsize all photos I post on the web. If I view the photo at full size, the pattern you see above her back legs disappears. Here is the color version of the photo:

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Lamar, Debbie, Nathaniel and Iggi :>~