Lifeboat at Dun Laoghaire

I’m posting this image as it has, I believe, the dubious honour of being the first shot I ever took with a monochrome conversion in mind.  In fact, it is probably the first shot that I ever put through a monochrome conversion that didn’t simply involve desaturating the image.  It’s not a great shot – it’s not even a good shot – but it’s part of my photographic history, and follows on nicely from yesterday’s image in that it too was taken on a visit to Dun Laoghaire many years ago after I first moved to Dublin.

At the time I went to take this shot of the lifeboat moored alongside the run-down building the light levels had fallen and, unknown to me at the time, my compact Fuji camera, in automatic mode, was increasing the ISO to keep the exposure correct.  Hence I was to end up with a noisy image, suffering in a lack of sharpness.  The compact camera, after all, would not have been known as a good low-light tool unlike some of the modern-day digital SLRs that can handle fairly extreme ISO levels.

Sadly I don’t have the exposure details for this shot (or indeed yesterday’s image) as the EXIF data seems to be missing, and apart from knowing that I shot this in automatic mode on a compact camera, I can’t recall what the settings I used were.

I do recall deciding that this scene might make a good choice for a monochrome shot – I think I felt the decaying background would be suited to that sort of a treatment, while the normally eye-catching orange colour of the lifeboat wouldn’t necessarily overpower the rest of the scene if it was converted to black and white.

For the processing I do recall using the Channel Mixer for the first time, which allowed me control over how what shade of grey the orange of the lifeboat appeared in the final image.  Such control isn’t available if you simply slide the saturation level of the image all the way to 0%, which is how I previously performed any monochrome conversions.   If this image achieved anything, it was in convincing me of the power of channel mixing for future colour to monochrome conversions.