While visiting the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, I felt the struggle between snapping up postcards and compelling story-telling. By this I mean that like many casual travel photographers before me, the temptation to capture beautiful sights and/or document every place we visited is strong. While this has its place in that the “let me prove I was there” travel shot is almost mandatory, we need to also think about telling the story of our vacations, capturing the local sense of place, the ethos, if you will, of the locale and its people. In this next set of 5 photos I was trying to do just that, and succeeding only in part.

It wasn’t until this last shot presented itself and I managed to catch the fleeting moment that I felt I had something that transcended the architecture, lighting and composition. It is the human element of that solitary woman in the shadow of the well-known structure that lends additional meaning and a degree of thoughtfulness to the photo. I’ll leave it to the viewer to decide what is the message or story behind this moment.

During my recent visit to Israel, I had the opportunity to witness and photograph several friends when they were baptized in the Jordan river. While reviewing the photos a few minutes later, I noticed how, thanks to the lighting and water, each person’s appearance was markedly different before going into and after coming out of the water. For me, this more strongly tied in the physical act to the spiritual reality it portrays.

The timing of one of the photographs made it an instant favorite.

Previously we saw a few travel shots taken with the local flavor in mind. “Local flavor” in local photography is best expressed in people since they most effectively define what a foreign place is all about.

Here are a few photos from Israel focusing on the local folk and re-processed in Black and White with Silver Efex.

Bazaar

Grape leaves

Standing on Dolorosa

Alley Guardian

At the school

Muslim mother

As we saw in a past book review, Michael Freeman believes that digital B&W conversion hold far greater flexibility and potential than their analog, film counterparts of the past:

“Digital black and white has largely overturned this. Indeed, it is impossible to overstate the significance of digital tools in creating black and white images. there are many, including layers, masks, channels, and curves, and the permutations, when using them together, are, virtually endless. At the heart of all this, however, is the ability to manipulate the three independent color channels, red, green, and blue, so as to control — again with infinite choice — the tonal value of all the colors in a scene. This is entirely new, and its potential is only now being explored.”

To “the heart of all this,” Freeman should now add the use of control points. Whereas in past conversion efforts I’ve relied almost exclusively on the interplay between the red and blue channels (more red, less blue) to achieve dark midday skies, in my recent efforts, I’ve been able to achieve even more dramatic results with my new B&W tool’s control point capability. Here are two examples I’ve worked on in the last couple of days, where judicious use of control points on an otherwise unremarkable and somewhat bland blue sky yielded dark, contrasting tonality there.

First the before pictures…

And then the after results…

Capernaum courtyard, Israel

Masada shelter, Israel

I’ve recently picked up a new Black and White (B&W) tool, Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro 2. Though in the past I’ve used Channel Mixer to process my B&W conversions, I am happy to report that Silver Efex makes B&W not only easier, but also brings additional capabilities, primarily through the use of control points, that really extend the level of flexibility digital B&W practitioners already have.

To illustrate this, I decided to do a comparison of results I could get through Photoshop’s B&W converter tool vs. Silver Efex for the following photo I took during my recent trip to Israel.

With some nice textures on the floor and walls, plus the nice shadow vs. contrast lighting in its favor, this shot is a good candidate for B&W. In fact, with a palette that mostly includes yellows and oranges (a tip for how we should emphasize color in the B&W conversion), this image is almost monochromatic. In other words, color isn’t a key component, so we have another indicator that B&W might work.

Using Photoshop CS5′s B&W converter tool, I opted to go for a color mix that emphasized yellow and red. That and a strong contrast curve plus a little levels tweak, along with an Unsharp Mask with radius=200 and strength=20% yields the following shot.

Not a bad result, but is it all that it could be? Let’s see if Silver Efex Pro 2 can do any better. Selecting the default preset and setting the Tri-X film look with some modifications, again, emphasis on yellow and red while removing the grain Tri-X brings out by default gives us the following.

The result isn’t that much better than the one obtained with Photoshop CS5, and in fact one could argue it is less striking, even after adding a strong contrast curve. This is where some folks trying out Silver Efex would ask themselves what is the point, and would discard the tool as a gimmick. In fact, part of the problem here is the lack of “structure” (which we achieved with the Unsharp mask settings described above), and we can take things a step further by adding control points that let us emphasize or de-emphasize certain parts of the image.

In my case, I decided I wanted a little more detail on that far brick chimney and the surrounding elements, so I set a control point there, and without brightening the rest of the scene I selectively darkened and added structure to that portion of the image. With another control point for the store interior, I raised the brightness roughly to what I achieved in the first B&W conversion. Finally, with a couple of control points on the stone path, I modified brightness to differentiate tonality from light to dark, back to light in the far background, and added more structure to raise local contrast in that nice flooring and stone walls detail. After saving the Silver Efex settings, back in Photoshop I followed up with a strong contrast curve adjustment layer set at very low opacity, just adding a bit of punch over what Silver Efex generated.

Which of these versions you prefer, if any, is a matter of personal preference. I tend to like (at least today) that last version for the gritty results I achieved.

I’ll end with one final tip: before launching Silver Efex, duplicate your original layer and convert the new layer to a “Smart Object.” Once you launch Silver Efex, it will then act as a “Smart Filter,” which after you save your settings, you can re-edit again if you decide to go for a different look.

During my recent trip to Israel, we visited several archeological sites, Bet She’an and Masada among them. Here are some photos I’ve processed from those locations. For the black and white images I used Nik Silver Efex Pro 2.