Steven Bourelle Digital Arts

This image was shot at Hyde’s Mill in South-west Wisconsin. What a cool little place.

We drove 150 miles, one way, just to see this beautiful little mill. It was worth every mile. When we got there it was very cloudy, perfect conditions for shooting the mill. The sun came out a little later and the scene became way to contrasty. Along with the mill there is an old blacksmith building, a bunch of grinding stones and three old rusty turbines.

In processing this image I did something I’ve never done before. I used Lightroom’s develop presets. Normally when I work on a black and white, or in this case sepia image, I do all the work in Photoshop and use a combination of Nik Software’s Silver Efexs Pro and adjustment layers. I wanted to do a black and white image of this scene and for some reason I started clicking on the presets. When I clicked on the sepia one I liked what I saw, then I clicked on a couple more and things really got interesting. I played around with the contrast, added a vignette and then exported the image.

Then I opened it up in Photoshop and continued to play around with it. I used Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro to add a little more vignette and to reposition it a little. I also did some burn work here and there and did some more contrast work with adjustment layers.

Before we left on this trip, I had a vision in my mind of the image I wanted from the mill. This image is pretty close to what I saw in my mind. It’s almost as if my subconscious knew what I wanted and clicked on the right Lightroom presets to give it to me.

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Here’s a new black and white image from our trip to Badlands National Park in South Dakota last spring. I’ve been trying to find the name of this formation, but I can’t find it online. If anyone happens to know it’s name, please leave a comment for me. Thanks.

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This image of the Kewaunee South Peirhead Lighthouse in Kewaunee WI was originally a horizontal, color image. On the day I shot it a haze had settled over Lake Michigan washing out the sky and creating a very harsh light. The only reason I took the picture was to document it for my Lake Michigan
Lighthouses page.

Though I didn’t care for the lighting in the picture, I was intrigued by the the fisherman sitting at the end of the pier. So I cropped the image vertically in order to make the fisherman a more important part of the scene. Then I forgot about the picture.

A couple weeks later I was looking through my images for possible black and whites when I came upon this picture. I thought it might make an interesting black and white, so I began playing around with it. Almost immediately I had a nostalgic feeling about this shot. It just felt old to me. Something about the lighthouse and that fisherman. This image could just as easily been taken a hundred years ago in 1909.

Because of that nostalgic feeling, I decided to give the image an aged look. I added grain to it and a fairly heavy vignette. I felt that the grain added texture to the image that gave it that older feeling I wanted. The vignette also added to the old feel, and it helped fill in that washed out sky.

This image is a good example of never giving up on a picture. Maybe the original wasn’t the best shot I’d ever taken, but with a little artistic vision and modern imaging software, I was able to create an image that I like a lot and that I’m very proud of.

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My interest in black and white photography began when I saw Ansel Adams famous “Moon and Half Dome” image for the first time. I was amazed by the dynamic contrast of Half Dome, the shadows and the sky. I always dreamed of creating images like that, but setting up a darkroom and learning the art of black and white photography wasn’t possible for me.

Then along came the digital darkroom and my dreams began to come true. Though I’ve been working with Photoshop for almost 10 years now, it wasn’t until this last winter that I began playing around with black and white. What I’ve discovered is a whole new world for my artistic expressions to bloom in. I’ve also found that many of my images that didn’t quite make it in color, can be turned into very dynamic black and white images. This Mt Whitney image is a perfect example.

This image was shot from the Whitney Portal Road. The camera I was using at the time was a Minolta DiMAGE A2. The lens on the A2 is a fixed 28-210mm zoom lens. I have an additional lens that screws on to the main lens and takes it up to 400mm. To get the composition that I wanted I ended up shooting this at 300mm.

For the conversion to black and white I used Photoshop. Within Photoshop I used a combination of adjustment layers, layers mask and the burn tool to get the final image.

Photo Details:
Minolta DiMAGE A2
Fixed zoom lens 28-210mm with telephoto lens extension.
Shot at 300mm
ISO 64
f/11 at 1/200 sec
Tripod mounted

Purchase Prints or Usage Rights for this image.

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