Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge – Gates

This week, Cee is looking for Fences and Gates for her Black & White Photo Challenge. We came across an interesting set of gates leading to the Fabyan Villa Museum along the Fox River in Batavia. Colonel and Nelle Fabyan’s 300 acre country estate was called Riverbank and included a working lighthouse, a windmill and a private zoo as well as gardens, a swimming pool and tennis courts. They hired Frank Lloyd Wright to enlarge and re-model the existing farmhouse in 1907 and the Villa then became their home until 1939. The museum is open to the public on Wednesdays and Sundays from 1pm – 4pm.

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge – Black and White

This week, guest host, Anne Sandler, has asked us to look at the world in Black and White for the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge. She also asks us to describe the process by which we convert our pictures to black and white images, so I thought it might be helpful to show both the original picture and the processed image. I don’t have an expensive camera or a lot of fancy software for doing this kind of work but what I have seems to be sufficient. For the first two b/w images I opened the originals in Microsoft Digital Image, converted them to black & white then made lighter and darker versions of both pictures. After that I sent them over to Canon Digital Photo Professional and put them through the HDR processor then sent the resulting images back to Digital Image for a final spruce up. Do I really know what I’m doing? Heck no! But I like the results. I find that the lack of color helps to focus the eye on the bold lines of the architecture.

The next two images were converted solely with the Digital Image software. I’ve used this program for years and it’s done the job remarkably well. Of course there are some things that it can’t do but I can live without all those extra features.