Age And Colour

A few days ago I posted a photo of the side of St Bene’t’s Church. It’s a digital image shot on my Ricoh GRIII.

Meanwhile, a couple of things:

I just sent three rolls of film to a lab for developing and scanning. One was colour and two are black and white.

And a photography magazine I sometimes buy had a feature on black and while photos.

So I was thinking black and white. It was on my mind.

And the church just seemed to so right to process in Photoshop as a black and white image.

Well, not black, but sepia. When I had a darkroom I used to sometimes sepia tone photographs.

Black and white photographs are very stable. Photos put in a box seventy-five years ago are often still fresh. Sepia toned photos are even more stable.

Sepia toning is a fairly simple process. Develop the film as normal. Print it as normal. Then take an extra step of putting the print in chemicals that convert the silver to a sulphide compound. (That’s ‘sulfide’ in American English). The result is an even more archival print.

So here is that same photo that I posted in colour, but sepia toned. I did it in Photoshop, so it is not actually sepia toned. It just looks the way sepia toned prints look.

I titled this post ‘Age and Colour’. Though I know this image is no older than the colour version, it ‘looks’ older.