keld helmer-petersen
Make sure that you have researched the work of Keld Helmer-Petersen in your books/on your websites including examples of his high contrast black and white images.
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Keld Helmer-Petersen was a Danish photographer born in 1920. In 1948 he published "122 colour photographs" which was a collection of images inspired by Albert Renger-Patzch. Photography became his profession and soon he released "Fragments of a City". He became well-known from his colour photographs however he also published a few books in black and white with all different contrasts of tone. Helmer-Petersen soon made a book called "Black light" this fully consisted of of black and white images with the middle tones removed. To create these images, he used a camera and a flat bed scanner. I quite like these images produced by Keld Helmer-Petersen, I think it is because the images are intriguing and there is part of a mystery behind the images which makes you want to look at them more to try to figure out what they are. |
my response
editing my images
The images below are of the some of the black and white images I took for "The World is beautiful" inspired by Albert Renger-Patzch. I used photoshop to get rid of most of the middle tones in the images so that there is none or hardy any grey left in the image. To get the images below to the same way as Keld Helmer-Petersen's was by making adjustments to the image, this mean I had to change the Threshold of the image. This is shown in the fourth image where the entire photo is only black and white with no grey on the scale. You can also adjust the levels of colours in the image, this is adjusting the RGB (Red, Green and Blue) to make the colour levels very close the being just black and white, however there is still quite a lot of grey in the image as this is not the best way to make the photo completely black and white.
edited images
The images below are my completed edited images, some of them still have some grey left as they did not look very good at all just being black and white with no grey. It is quite a difficult balance between the pictures being too black or too white which make the images unrecognisable and lose the style of Keld Helmer-Petersen.
my completed book
The images above are of my finished book. I had to make quite a few decisions whilst making this book like how much I was going to contrast the images. Overall, I quite like the images I edited as you can tell what some of them are completely however others are more difficult to decipher their original form but not too much as I didn't want it to be more of a focus on what the photo is than looking at the photo itself.