China Camp State Park Then and Now

Photo: Old Historic Shrimp Fishing Village and Female Sunbather, China Camp State Park, California

Clearly I prefer color photography but there are certain situations where color can be a distraction. For this image of the last remaining Chinese shrimp fishing village in the San Francisco Bay Area, I wanted to juxtapose the historical aspects of the China Camp fishing village with the modern day site being used as a recreational park.

The best way of converting color images to black and white is quite easy. All you have to do is open the photo in Photoshop and use the "Channel Mixer" adjustment layer then check the "Monochrome" button. The image will turn black and white with the slider at 100% Red, 0% Green, and 0% Blue. Those values correspond to the type of B&W filter that you would use if you were shooting it on film. Each image responds differently to the color values so you should experiment with the sliders. The important thing is to make sure those three slider values add up to about 100% when you are done.

For this image, I used 100% red to simulate the Red B&W filter effect. What this does is create a stark black sky where there was originally blue, and accentuate the high contrast on anything else of a lighter color. Ansel Adams used this filter often and very effectively for his most famous images. Of more subtle detail is the female sunbather being juxtaposed in color. I just masked the channel mixer layer out of the area around the woman.

To see a bigger photo, click here.