A quick snap of a metal teapot on the rough wooden table at the Tea Gardens, at the Grand Western Canal (now unfortunately closed for the season, to re-open at Easter) gave me another chance to play with monochrome. Reducing with the Channel Mixer, in the usual way, using The GIMP, then warming the tone up to a nice golden brown shade:
I’m really quite pleased with this one. The Nikon 55-200 VR DX lens has some heavy vignetting, but a lot of the time, it gives quite a nice effect, and I like how it’s worked here.
We had our usual walk by the canal today, and I did a bit more playing with monochrome when we returned. I took this photo of grass for the pattern and contrast, so it was a prime candidate for black and white:
The last part of our journey is by street, and this chimney pot caught my eye - an H in the sky:
I was only taking shots to experiment with the exposure modes on my Nikon D40, but as I was finishing up, I snatched a couple of shots of our light shade that I thought might be good for something. That something turned out to be experimenting with black and white. Practical Photography magazine had a monochrome theme in their latest issue, which gave me a clue on making better mono images, with more options for tweaking.
Their tip was to use the Channel Mixer rather than just changing the colour mode. Their instructions were all for Photoshop, but it translated pretty easily to The GIMP - just find the Channel Mixer under Filters, Colors. Tick the box for Monochrome, and play with the sliders to get the look you want. As the magazine said, the best results seemed to be when the slider values added up to around 100:
