With Henning Hartnacke
A series about black-and-white photography and the decisions that make it yours: the masters, the history, and the hands-on craft of shooting and converting with intent.
The film look is authorship, not chemistry. The photographer is the author and the medium is raw material, not the other way around.
Three photographers prove it. Paolo Roversi manipulated Polaroid chemistry and then carried that same look into digital. Anton Corbijn's high-contrast look gets credited to Tri-X, though it may really be the lith printing process. Nadav Kander went from military darkrooms to digital without losing himself. Ansel Adams' zone system is the historical proof underneath all three.
Then a full Capture One black and white workflow: colour sensitivity sliders, black point, luma curves, split toning and grain, extended into the advanced moves for anyone chasing a Salgado look.
Peter opens with a personal story about a UN keynote before handing over the rest of the stream.
UN keynote and the "silver medal" lesson 0:00 Peter recounts giving a keynote at the UN and reframes his own performance anxiety as self-imposed perfectionism, landing on advice to dive deeper into whatever scares you rather than avoid it.
Why Tri-X and Polaroid actually look different 13:40 Henning breaks down the real physical tonal signatures of Kodak Tri-X and Polaroid 8x10, from dynamic range to highlight roll-off, before arguing Capture One controls the same variables directly.
Roversi case study 19:16 Henning traces Paolo Roversi's signature look across Polaroid, digital medium format, and DSLR to show the medium changed but the author didn't.
Corbijn case study 26:04 Henning shows Anton Corbijn's "grainy, contrasty" reputation actually came from darkroom printer Michael Spry's lith process, not Tri-X itself.
Kander case study 32:31 Henning uses Nadav Kander's move from darkroom to fully digital portraiture to argue signature lives in tonal decisions, not medium.
Ansel Adams' zone system as precedent 41:41 Henning cites Adams' zone system as proof that even film's most celebrated tonal control was authored, not received from the film stock.
Capture One black-and-white workflow demo 46:40 Henning walks step by step through fixing basics, the six color-response sliders, black and white point levels, the midtone slider, luma curve shaping, split toning, and controlled grain use.
Advanced toning for a Salgado-style look 1:00:40 Responding to Def's question, Henning shows a subtle golden-brown tint for perceived black thickness, localized clarity use, and the Color Editor for isolated tonal adjustments.
Calibrated monitors matter for tonal edits 1:04:52 Henning flags that black-and-white edits read very differently depending on viewer screen calibration, reinforcing Peter's standing advice to work calibrated.
Lighting style and black-and-white conversion 1:08:59 Jeff and Henning discuss how Rembrandt or keyhole-kick lighting converts more dramatically to black-and-white than butterfly lighting.
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