"I am a swan!"

by Ken
(Swindon, Wiltshire, UK)

This autumn photo of swans was originally in colour and taken with my new Pentax K100D Super Digital SLR, set on Program Automatic Exposure mode at 1536 x 1024 recorded pixels.

I was initially excited by the composition of the picture but then I read your tutorial on Photoshop channel mixer on how to create a black and white image from colour.

This is my first attempt. I chose this photo to practice on because of it's high contrast. I am very pleased with the result and I welcome your comments.


Thanks for the submission Ken (and apologies for taking so long to post it - I've been moving a few things around here and it took longer than expected!).

There definitely is high contrast in this scene, and it works well in black and white.

Good to use the channel mixer too. It really does give black and white photos more 'punch' (click to read how to use the channel mixer to create a black and white picture)

From a technical point of view, the tree branch unfortunately seems to 'spear' two of the swans!

If you could have captured the swans away from the branch it would have avoided this. But of course, these are wild birds not trained chimps, so that might have been a bit tricky to achieve!

Thanks for the submission Ken,

Darrell.