Black & White pictures can be really beautiful

April 3rd, 2008 · No Comments

I’m sick as hell (I’ve got chicken pox or chicken porx since I’m a little overweight these days) and got time kill in bed. So I started spending more time in my latest hobby: photography. It’s strange how I used to take pictures just because of my photo obsessive-compulsive disorder and never realised I really like photography; that is. the urge was primarily to remember the moment than to enjoy the picture – I blame Kodak because it used to say remember to remember
Now, slowly, thanks to Internet, my N95 and in particular Flickr and its community, I’m looking at my pictures in a “different light”…

So, considering I had a huge selection of pictures and I could not go anywhere I started to look at my past pictures and started playing with them using Photoshop… Few things I learned so far:

You can take beatiful pictures even with a N95
You’ve got lower chances of taking nice pictures with the N95 so you should take as many as you can unless you want to take a proper camera with you. Thanks to Nokia (in a sarcastic way though) and the extremely high compression of its photographs (notice the high variation in size), you can take a lot of pictures before you fill your memory card…
Black and white conversion seems not give the best result with N95 pictures. There is always a lot of noise in the pictures and the image does not look crisp and clear as it should (compared for example to a 5 years digital camera)

Some examples:

N95 – day example. OK

N95 – another day example, kind of OK. I love the original version of the next photo. It was taken on a cool morning in Kista (Stockholm) when I was going to work and it just snowed. Unfortunately, you can see some noise especially in dark areas…pity. But I love this picture as well as the original…

N95 – night example (some light in the background). Kind of OK.

And this is an example of how a nice, crystal clear picture should be. Look at how nice is the contrast, how sharp is the picture. I love it. Why, Nokia had to set the compression algorithm so high (without judging the rest of the camera) is beyond me.