How to photograph Moss (not Kate)

[Thierry Schreiner]

Hi there,

I am just starting a new project, namely photographing WW I ruins in Northern France.
The main subject will be "blockhauses", bunkers, etc. in the middle of the woods.

These huge concrete constructions are almost entirely covered with big layers of dark green, almost black moss.

Equipment used will be Calumet 8x10, Bergger BPF200, and the whole range of G-Clarons. I just happen to love them.

Now my question. What would you suggest interms of B+W filters to render this moss most adequately?

Thank you in advance for your input and best regards

Thierry

[Bruce Watson]

A green filter will lighten green in your print. That is, it will help lift the greens out of the shadows a little so that you can better see the texture. It will of course have the opposite effect on reds making them appear darker in your print.

[Ash]

You'll probably want to choose your time of day to make sure light is directed properly. Any shadow falling on the subject will make for a painful negative I think. Are you doing close up or full building images?

[Ed Richards]

Depends on whether you want to lighten it or push it to black. I think you need to experiment - shoot a frame with a strong green filter, a strong yellow, a yellow green, a light red, and a dark red. Get some blue sky in some of the test shots, so you can get a feel for what the filter is going do to the relative values in the shot. Also do a set with soft-light/fog to see how that changed the filter effect. Very angular lighting also going to help bring out the texture. You will probably want to use expanded development to bring out texture as well, as long as you do not have any sky to go white.

It sounds like a very rewarding project! Post pix as you go.

[Ole Tjugen]

I believe there may be quit a bit of blue in that dark moss, so I think I would try that first. I was surprised at how light the moss came out with orthochromatic film.

[Ed Richards]

If you have a digital camera, shoot a picture of the moss with a grey card, balance the grey card in Photoshop or another editor, and look at the RGB channels for the moss. You could do the same with a scan of a slide with a grey card. Ole is right on point - some moss is blue-green.

[fred arnold]

Depends on the moss. Out here we have bright yellow-green moss which grows in the yard (#11 or #8 lightens, #25 doesn't do much because of the yellow component), and blue-green little hummocks out in the woods. Unfortunately, those mosses have very little actual color saturation, so trying to darken them seems to just make them muddy. Ole might be onto the right approach; AA mentions in one picture of hemlocks in shade (also blue-green), using a #44 blue-green filter. I saw the print once, and the effect is nice.

Of course, my personal opinion on moss is "Ektachrome".

[C. D. Keth]

This sounds like a very interesting application for infrared.

[Brian Ellis]

Filters in black and white photography aren't used to affect the tone of a single object of one color or variations of the same color. Filters are used to change the tonal relatonships between two or more objects of different colors that without a filter will tend to merge rather than stand out from each other in a b&w photograph.

So whether you use a filter at all, and if you do what filter you use, depends on what different colors (if any) are in the moss itself or in the scene. If there are no other objects except the moss and the moss is all the same color or variations of the same color (presumably green) then there's no reason to use any filter. You can make a normal exposure of the moss without a filter and then print it any way you like - dark, light, whatever. You will only want to use a filter if there's some other color in the scene or within the moss itself that without a filter won't separate well in the negative.

Just as a simple example, assume the green moss is partly covering a red barn and you want to include the moss and part of the barn in the photograph. You meter the red and the green and the readings are so close that you realize the two colors won't separate well in the negative, i.e. the red and green tones will merge and the moss won't stand out from the barn. So you use a filter to help separate the tones.

Which filter you use depends on what you want to accomplish. If you want the moss to appear darker and the red barn to appear lighter then you'd use a red filter. If you want the moss to appear lighter and the barn to appear darker you'd use a green filter. But if you're photographing only the moss and there's no color other than green in it or in the scene, or if there is more than one color but they'll separate well by themselves (e.g. dark green moss against a light colored background), there's no reason to use any filter and doing so will only lengthen your exposure time unnecessarily or degrade the image or both.

[Bruce Osgood]

Filters in black and white photography aren't used to affect the tone of a single object of one color or variations of the same color. Filters are used to change the tonal relatonships between two or more objects of different colors that without a filter will tend to merge rather than stand out from each other in a b&w photograph.

end snip

Thank you Brian, you've put it all in a nut shell for me.