Tinting as an alternative to black & white

 
Ok, everybody familiar with this blog knows my favorite Picasa tool is the Filtered B&W. I don't use a lot of color in my photographs by choice. First, the gym is not a particularly colorful place. Second, the things that ARE colorful (mats, flags, and medicine balls) have already been featured in my blog. Time for something new. Enter Picasa's Tint feature.

I've used the tint feature before, but never with the Color Preservation slider. In the case of the picture above, I wanted to go for a different effect from the other pics I recently posted. I had already posted a black & white shot of Treefrog doing the Warriors Never Die workout. And the other day I posted a full color shot of her. Today, I'm going middle of the road. I decided to keep a little color, but only just enough to add a few accent notes to the photograph. So I slid the color preservation slider about halfway from the starting point until just her athletic top, mats, and dynamax ball had some tint to them, but everything else was bland. Then I selected the white filter to give it a black and white feel.

This effect is often used to give pictures an "old photograph" look, but I thought I'd try to use it to underscore the feeling of old-fashioned sweat and toil. Treefrog is exhausted. She's half-way through a beast of a workout and, if I recall my own experience doing this WOD, this is where the world starts to shrink and lose all detail in your mind. So I thought I'd try to mimic that with the coloring. Not sure I achieved it, but it's a different look than I usually produce, so it's kinda neat.

Here's the original for comparison:
 

Reflections

 

A while back I tried to do some creative shots with the mirrors in our gym but was ultimately foiled by 1) the reflected flash from my camera was too distracting, and 2) the mirrors weren't very clean and every smudge was highly visible in the photos. So I gave up on deliberately trying to use the reflection as an artistic device. But every now and again it comes in handy. For instance, the above shot originally looked like this:
 
It was the result of one of those random shots you take just to capture the general hubbub of a workout with no real attempt at framing or composition. After I went through all of the shots, I thought this one might be worth some more work. In the background, Aaron Riley (one of our MMA instructors), was talking to Brown (our CrossFit instructor) and striking a fighting stance. Originally I tried to crop it so both Brown and Aaron were in the shot, but the barbell in the foreground was too distracting as it cut across Brown's legs.

My solution was to use the reflection in the mirror. I realized I could crop out Brown without losing his presence because he was perfectly reflected in the mirror. The result is a much tighter shot of Aaron and a more interesting picture, I think. The bumper plate of the barbell is still visible, but it's not nearly as distracting as in the original.

Finally, I converted to grayscale using filtered black & white, and then added a pale yellow tint just to see how it would look. I liked it so I kept it that way.