After waiting so long to get photographs of Homer (or Homer, Jr.) with his entire gorget aglow in glorious magenta (Click here), I got to thinking about what a black and white hummingbird photograph would look like. After all, there must have been wildlife photographers shooting hummingbirds with black and white film before the days of color film. I used the Kodak T-Max 100 Pro filter in Macphun’s Tonality CK to convert one of the photos I took a couple of days ago to black and white. I was amazed to see that this B&W film is still available (at least through B&H Photo) and is described as having a very fine grain and high sharpness. It is ASA 100 film, the equivalent of ISO 100 on a DSLR but I made the digital exposure at ISO 1600 because it was quite dark on my north facing patio late on a rainy afternoon. I think the resulting photograph is interesting…a kind of Kodak moment, if you will.
One of the benefits of digital is the instant iSO changes. In the film days a lot of photographers would have used Tri-X, ASA 400, film. The B&W version does make an interesting image. You’d have to shoot the entire roll of 24 or 36 & develop & print them to see what your result were.