Photo by: Uncle Phooey.

This is a cool picture I found in the Recent Interesting section of Flickr. I love the black and white conversion. The lighting on the trees makes the black and white come out great. It helps make the image look older and more vintage; appropriate for a century-old mill. The composition is cool, too, with the road bending away behind the mill.

Photo by: Kmeron.

Found this shot in the “Concert” tag on Flickr. At first glance, I really liked it. I think it could have been cropped a little tighter (cut off a bit on the top) for better composition, but otherwise nice. The black and white conversion is cool. But it also highlights a problem with photographing in low-light conditions (like a concert) – blur and image size. If you look at this image in a small size (like the thumbnail in the sidebar or the medium size in this post), it looks pretty crisp. If you click through and look at the large or full size image, it gets really blurry.

In this case, it was shot at 1/160, which is relatively quick. But, it was also shot at 180mm focal length. What probably happened here is some camera shake (and the guitarist’s hand might have been moving quick enough to cause some motion blur there). When you’re looking at the LCD screen on your camera, it’s easy to take a quick glance and assume that a picture is crisp and/or in focus. Then, you get home, fire up Lightroom, and that 1:1 preview makes you cringe. Eugh. Not a lot you can do here. I’m not sure how good the D700 is at high ISO levels, but jacking that up (from 1250) to get another stop out of the shutter speed might have helped…

Still a nice pic, though. As long as you’re not printing it, you can still be happy with a shot like this. I have, however, had similar shots that looked good at first and then looked not so good once they hit the printer.

Photo by: Joe Gascoigne.

This is a cool portrait. Simple lighting – probably a single light high and camera left and a subtle background light (altho that might also be the key light). There’s probably a reflector or a wall (or maybe another light?) off camera right to fill in the shadows. But what I really like is the style. Between the outfit, the hairdo, and the black and white conversion, this makes for a nice, 1950′s retro look. There are a bunch more in the photostream, so click through and check them out.

An eerie black and white image of an abandoned looking building.

Picture by izthistaken.

I found this picture while browsing through the “portraits” tag on Flickr. Not what I expected at all to be lumped in with portraits.

But cool nonetheless. The building is very rustic looking, nice subject. Looks kinda like the house is lit from the front, judging by how bright the exposure of the sky behind the house and the fact that the house is well exposed too. The edges kind of throw you off, though. Could be the light falling off, but looks more like vignetting applied in post processing.