A Little Bit of Black And White Work With The X-T1

Deadrise work boat in Poquoson, Virginia
Black and white JPEG from the Fujifilm X-T1; Black and white set with the red filter (click to enlarge)
For this image, I applied a slightly warm effect to the lower tones as is my preference for black and white.

Saturday was a very nice early spring day in southeastern Virginia.  The sky was blue, the air was warming and the wind was negligible.  In fact, it was a perfect day to get out and make some images.  I packed up my Fujifilm X-T1 with my 18-55mm lens and headed over to the edges of the Chesapeake Bay to see what I could find in the way of deadrise work boats and fisherman.  Since it was a Saturday, I didn't expect to find any fisherman, crabbers or oysterman, but I always enjoy photographing their boats.

Since I hadn't done any black and white work with my X-T1 as of yet, I thought I would use my "Film Simulation" bracketing feature and set one of the three choices for black and white.  I wanted to see how the camera's software handled the conversion and I wanted to see how the software handled the Film Simulation bracketing.  In fact, I set the camera for use of the BW/red filter since the sky was blue and I like a dark sky in my black and white images, if possible.

Here are a few of the images I made Saturday morning.  The sun was bright, the boats painted bright white and shining directly on them.  There was lots of contrast but the sensor didn't have a problem holding the bright tones.  The shadows were deep as well.

(click to enlarge)

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The deadrise work boat is the almost universal work boat of the Chesapeake Bay.  It is used for crabbing, gill net fishing, oystering and hauling.  The design was developed in the late 1800s.  Deadrise refers to the V-shaped bottom at the bow and the angle formed as the keel levels off to a horizontal line and the rise of the keel upward to the sideboards.

Just as a bonus, I thought I would throw in a color image as well...

On the way home, I thought I would grab a quick Amtrak photograph since the train would be coming by about the time I was crossing the tracks.  The train was traveling 79 mph at this point.  I used manual exposure and manual focusing for this image.  A nicely sharp image with pleasing color and lots of detail.

ISO 400; 1/1600th sec. @ f/6.4; 55mm (83 ~e) (click to enlarge)

These images had very little editing in Lightroom.  One of the purposes of my little experiment was to see how JPEGS look from the X-T1 without having to do much editing. I think the sharpness setting for JPEGS at +1 is about right for my taste.  These had that setting and no additional sharpening was applied in Lightroom.  Overall, I'm very happy with the results.


Thanks for looking.  Enjoy!

Dennis Mook

Many of my images can be found at www.dennismook.com.  Please pay it a visit.  I add new images regularly.  Thank you.


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