Exercise: Strength of interpretation

For this exercise I had to look at working with the tonal range.  I had to find 2 images that would suit the following:

• A strong increase in contrast that will include clipping in at least the shadow areas.  
• Low key or high key treatment in which the entire brightness range is shifted up or down. 

The first image is of the London Eye on a sunny day.  There is quite a lot of contrast in the image as it stands however when I apply an S-curve to the image the colour of the sky is not very pleasing.  It looks fake.  When converted to black and white it looks better as the colour is not an issue and the viewer can focus on the shape of the clouds which is otherwise overlooked by the bright colour.  

Original Image

S curve applied to the tone curve

Black and white

For the second image I chose a bike with passers-by in the city.  

Original

High key colour

High and white

Again the colour image is not very pleasing with the colours looking bleached out and weak.  However the black and white conversion which I preformed using a preset in Lightroom works well and places the emphasis and focus on the bike and couple walking by.  

The shape of the bike was very distinctive and the black and white conversion embraces this and accentuates the form and lines and movement in the image.  These are graphic qualities that are suitable for black and white conversions.  

I knew from experience that a black and white conversion of the London Eye would work too because of the clouds and the blueness of the sky.  Black and white tends to bring our the richness of the tones in skies like this.  Good black and white pictures nearly always have a pure white and a pure black.