[Zig]

Selsley Common is a typical outdoor space around here.
Apparently, when the last glaciers so many thousands of years ago were, er, glaciating, they flowed around areas of harder rock, with the result of nowadays having the River Severn Vale dropping several hundred feet beneath the limestone scarps of the Cotswolds.
Where I live, at the edge of the Cotswolds as the Severn Vale's alluvial plain lies between here and the distant Forest of Dean, is thus punctuated by several hills risng straight out of the plain. Standing here with me now, looking west, we are on one of these limestone hills, each of which has its little microflora and fauna...Doverow Hill in front of us(behind which is Castle Zig, as I call my home when I'm on Shuttertalk) is another.

Imagine these hills, then, standing out of the landscape over the few thousand years of human inhabitation, unchanged save for stone and iron being open-mined from them...their present names similarly rise through the strata of languages spoken by successive waves of immigrés, so that it is possible to hear some of the names given to these hills from 5,000 years ago poking through the overlays of modern tongues...
For instance, a hill near me is called Maidenhill...which is an echo that comes from way back beneath Middle English, beneath the French Normans, beneath the Scandinavian Vikings, beneath the Anglo-Saxon, beneath even the Latin of the Roman occupation: the P-Celtic mai dun, or, the fort on the hill(roughly). Out of shot to the left is a village around a hill called Uley. Uley lies in a bend in the hill system, almost like in the crook of one's elbow: now, in Q-Celtic, the Celtic tongue that even pre-dates Old Welsh and which is the basis of spoken Irish or Gaelic, there is a word uille, which means "elbow". So Irish have their uilleann pipes, so named because their bags are driven by elbow power...like the later bagpipes which are mechanically similar...indeed, we can even hear the very word in our Modern English elbow. Q-Celtic would have been spoken at a guess perhaps way further back than the Iron Age, perhaps even the Bronze Age......Imagine that, names of local hills being essentially unchanged since a thousand years plus, before Christ was born... So, all these hills round here, with seemingly "English" names such as Doverow, Churchdown, Cleeve, Belas Knapp, Selsley, Cam, Uley Bury, have echoes of the languages spoken by those who built the barrows and passage-graves that even today are clearly visible.

And so I wondered how many uncounted thousands of people over uncounted thousands of years have sat up on these hills, facing the far horizon in the westering light, wondering about the passing of life, where the sun goes to once it dips below the horizon, gazing down from a pensive height to look at the small specks of humans and cattle in the fields....
This hill from where I'm taking these shots is still such a place: families with toddlers or old 'uns; courting couples, people nowadays flying kites or showing off by hang-gliding. Some walk their dogs, briskly striding along the sheep-paths and throwing a stick or ball which the dog carries with a possessive and cheeky grin; some merely sit silently in their cars without even getting out of them, listening to Radio 4 and ruminating, staring at the horizon as if it's a TV channel they can't be bothered to switch over...
...and some choose a spot to sit, and just sit, and keep on sitting, lost in a world between within and without, or tracking the clouds and seeing castles, doggies and clowns' faces...and all the while a skylark twittering away, cascading a song from heights unseen.

This old couple for instance: I do hope by the Grace and mercy of God that one day I will be married, and that in the latter years will do as this couple do, to sit and speak a language that has become so refined and love-grown that in special moments, uttered words would never quite convey what unspoken ones might.
So captivated I was by this couple, that I approached them from several angles merely to photograph them; they were as insouciant as teenegers throughout... In fact, even after I'd wandered off, sat for a while, wandered again, and finally sighed my way to my car, they were still there, as was the song of the skylark...so I wondered if the real essence of the two of them was off and away somewhere, singing and cascading in heights unseen...

So, here is my short journey around them and a picture, in half-pictures and as through a glass darkly for certain, of the physical representation of where their eartly eyes were pointed, at any rate!

[nia]

Wonderful dear Zig, you almost carried me into these beautiful B&W photographs... and you wrote so nicely too. Thank you so much for this post, I am impressed so much. What a great journey you did. Blessing and Happiness, with my love, nia

[Don Schaeffer]

Very nice. Magical place you live in.

[Toad]

A truly wonderful story. I love how you have started with a historical context, and seamlessly interwoven not only a description of your world, but the story of the Couple as well. Very nicely paced and crafted.

...and before I forget - outstanding landscapes. #1 and #2 particularly stirred me - primarily because of the flow of lines fron the peripheries flowing towards the Couple. Classic technique that in this case fully supports the flow of the narrative.

Photo Stories and Journalism has been my favorite forum for some time now, and this really illustrates why.

[Kombisaurus]

These are amazing Zig. Particularly the first three.

The light on the grass, the flowing lines, the cotton-wool clouds, and your B/W conversion that almost completely emininates the blue channel all set the perfect dream-like (almost infra-red looking) stage for the photos. And then the couple themselves provide the story.
Every single element in these photos adds something to their respective image, and there are no extraneous elements. There is a simplicity, a restraint, a single-mindedness, and an elegance in the scene itself, in your composition, and in your processing that really comes through.

The amount of processing you've done here is just perfect. It really complements the underlying photo without competing with it or distracting from it. It gives a surreal otherworldly feeling, yet doesn't feel manipulated, or overcooked. I believe you've found a perfect balance here.

[Zig]

Why, many sincere thanks all; that'll teach me to be so remiss in checking back over posts!

A resumé of my processing, if anyone would find it interesting: once you get past the wordiness of the first cuple of points, it all boils down rather simpl(istical)ly:

1. Firstly, and I know it's merely semantics, ...but I hardly ever either think of or treat a monochrome image as a "conversion", just on the grounds that the term can be a bit misleading. Yes, the raw is converted in the plain sense of being transformed from a raw to a tif, yet I'd not wish you to think, for example, that I started by obtaining a "colour" image and worked out how to make it "go".
My very first part of the workflow, then, is for me to assume the position, if you like, of "seeing" in black and white whilst in the circling round stages: lines, tones, shapes, composition, along with getting a sense of where the main chunky bits of very dark and very light will be.
And Ade is on the money here with the sense of Infrared "film"...in fact, this was the first mental juggling-act I was computing....

2. I say "juggling-act" for a reason: If a mono film shooter wants blue skies to come out black, (s)he will either/and/or use a red or even a polarising filter so as to stop the passage of those blues. However, whereas in Infrared film you have living greens registering as just about white, if one just puts on a red filter, normally it's the greens as well as the blues that darken and block up. With a digital sensor one is helped by a degree of native IR sensitivity that film users would not usually have, but I find the one way to make grass "go" a little lighter is, quite simply, by metering off the grass then over-exposing for it.
The problem then, I hear you cry, is how can you get rich, dark skies if you're over-exposing something that you should normally be treating as 18%grey? (Well, I thought I heard you cry it, anyway...! ) That is, if I'm purposefully overexposing the shot, how on earth do I get darker blue(black)skies?
3. Well, to come clean here, I didn't have a grey or ND grad filter either...but I just relied on the fact there was quite a bit of dynamic range between the reflective and pale, end-of-season, whitening grass, and the non-reflective blue sky...AND I made sure that, even though I did not have my polariser , I did check that I was pointing my camera at the area of sky was obviously polarised even to the naked eye.
So, walking around and then positioning myself. was the next main feature of my workflow. In other words, by taking the trouble to get the front end right, there's not so much forcing and bending of it in the actual processing stages at the rear end.
4. Dodge. And. Burn.
Now, this technique is NOT actually what we used to do in the darkroom, though the physical mechanics of what we do are similar: "Proper" darkroom D+B, is adding to or subtracting from the amount of light hitting the silver compounds in the photo paper: when we allow more light to hit the paper, more silver reacts and it darkens...the "burning" is the conversion of the silver salts. We might also "dodge" our hands or a piece of card so as to slow the silver reaction down, keeping the scene lighter and more untouched.
Our digital "version" of this is not so much fun, and is only increasing or reducing local contrast.
For "dodging"(making lights lighter): choose a large soft paintbrush, set the opacity slider to about 3% only, then with your mouse do a scrubbing motion: this will lighten the light parts(I use it if I've got clouds too dirty or glass too dark grey.
R-clicking in the same menu-box gives you the burn tool: this time set it not to "highlights as we did with the dodge tool, but to "shadows", again at about 3%, or you'll get a big dark smudge across your pic! Ideal of course for getting dark thing darker: so, if you want those scary black skies, this is the tool.

4. There are additional ways to get darker skies in your black and whites.
We've mentioned pointing your camera at the naturally-polarising part of a blue sky, yes: but in the opening stages of your looking at your (at present) colour image, by all means go into the saturation sub-menu, saturating the blues/cyans and even darkening them too. And while you're there, lighten any yellows or greens, so there'll be less dodging(lightening) of the highlights needed.

5. By this time I'll have made the switch to a black and white image. BUT make sure you keep the image in a colour space: you might wish to alter channels later(though I find the channels approach a bit too grubby really)...and of course you might wish to try and do an approximation of sepia, split, selenium or platinum toning, so you'd need to remain in a colour environment to do this.

6. Now, here is when I do the single most effective bit of alteration since actullay taking te photo correctly: it is by far one of the most effective tools in the Armoury of Zig). It is a key way to inject drama into your skies if you have sky and cloud detail you wish to maximise...and I warn you that once you break through into this technique, you will see a transformation of your work and a boost to your enjoyment and confidence. I am of course referring to Contrast Masking.
Essentially another "darkroom practice", in which actual masking was used(ever thought why "Unsharp Mask" seems to be a mis-nomer? It isn't, of course, it's just that most digital kitboys know so little about light and even less about how and why light does what it does), this in its most basic terms for our purpose gives a drama that exceds that of dodging/burning.
There are plug-ins out there that work very well, and it's worth researching and tring out a few times.
I myself do have my own way of ding this but I also have a Poor Man's way of doing it...which I used on the above shots.
This is what I did:
a) Duplicate your image(background) as another layer, so you have Background and Background Copy;
b) Merely go to the opacity slider on this copy, drag it down to zero, then in the layers tab change it from "Normal" to "Overlay";
c) Sloooowwwly, increase your opacity slider to a value that you think is dramatic, then go to the main Layers tab at the top of your screen, choose Flatten Image.
7. That's about it: go to main Image tab, select Image Size; type in 750 pixels vertical; t will scale your shot accordingy;
Apply the merest bit of Smart Sharpen; convert Mode from 16 to 8-bit; Save As level 8 jpeg.

Incidentally, here is a shot of the Malvern Hills I took on Sunday...I used exactly all of my workflow above to get this shot: see how the sky has worked in axactly the same way?



[EDIT: There is something odd going on with the compression of a couple of pics I upload from time to time: I submitted a pin-sharp jpeg, yet I'm seeing it on screen as if its edges are gone a bit muddy. Ne'er mind, you can see the idea here at any rate. Shaun]