Colour into tones in black and white

This was an interesting exercise. Unfortunately I could not find the colour sliders in photoshop under image/adjustments. Perhaps I have an older version of photoshop. Instead I used "enhance" to convert the photograph I took to black and white. I then adjusted the black and white photo to have more blue, more red and more green. Unfortunately there was no adjustment for yellow. There are very subtle differences in the photographs but in retrospect I might have been better to adjust the intensity setting when making these changes. None the less I can see from the course work that a black and white image can be adjusted by understanding colour.

Marville

On my tutor's suggestion I read a chapter titled "Marville" in Graham Robb's book entitled Parisians.

I very much enjoyed reading the chapter and as my tutor indicated it did give a very good insight into how early photography was used as a recording medium.

Marville was a french landscape and architecture photographer who was especially well known for taking pictures of ancient Parisian scenes before they were destroyed and the city was rebuilt under Baron Haussmann's new plan for the modernisation of Paris. A decade later Marville also took photographs of the new roads.

I thought the comparison the author made of Marville's photograph of Place-Saint-Andre-des-Art in 1865 with the one taken thirty three years later was interesting. As the author says "so much information is contained in that split-second burst of photons". It is fascinating that a photograph of that nature can reveal so much. A lot of information can especially be deduced from the different advertisements show in the photographs at the time.

I also found Robb's description of Marville's early experience of being a photographer and his meticulous printing and probable delight at the process evocative.