From “Pitch Black” in The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair:
“Pitch black is the most fearsome kind of darkness. For humans, fear of it, perhaps lingering from the days before we could reliably make fire, is universal and ancient. In the dark we become acutely aware of our limitations as a species: our senses of smell and hearing are too blunt to be of much use in navigating the world, our bodies are soft, and we cannot outpace predators. Without sight, we are vulnerable. Our terror is so visceral we are wont to see nighttime as pitch black, even when it isn’t. Thanks to the moon, the stars, and, more recently, fire and electricity, nights so dark that we cannot see anything are rare, and we know that, sooner or later, the sun will rise again…. Perhaps this is why we experience night, figuratively at least, as more than just an absence of light….
“The most eloquent expression of humanity’s fear of pitch black is also one of the oldest. It comes from the Book of the Dead, the Egyptian funerary text used for about 1,500 years until around 50 B.C. Finding himself in the underworld, Osiris, the scribe Ani, describes it thus:
“‘What manner [of land] is this into which I have come? It hath not water, it hath not air; it is deep, unfathomable, it is black as the blackest night, and men wander helplessly therein.'”
From “Portrait of the Artist” in Eleven Days Before Spring: Poems by JoEllen Kwiatek:
The blonde moon grows whiter
as it rises in the spring sky
which is delicate as a watercolor.
Spring is late this year.
I notice the first leaves growing
in curly on the shorn branches poised
as sprigs. For a while, they garnish
the moon. For a while, the difference
between foreground and background is
most obvious as that between the dark
loaded hills and faint sky. I love
the moment of contrast —
though it’s hard to achieve….
Hello!
I haven’t done a photos-on-black-background series in a while, so I decided to pick a few of the chrysanthemum and daisy photos I’ve been posting since late 2024 and do just that. It had been long enough since I’d done this work that it took me a minute to remember how to get results that I like. Once “muscle-memory” took over, however, I got a little carried away (as one does!) and ended up picking 68 photos (to split among three posts) for black-background treatment. Given that February was a lousy winter-weather month here in the Southeast — many million raindrops, much wind, and extremely small temperatures — staying warm and dry at my desk with my canine assistant snoozing at my feet seemed like a good way to spend my time.
I originally took all these mum and daisy photos during several trips to Oakland Cemetery on cloudy days that were bright enough to enhance the colors and textures of these flowers without creating any harsh shadows — making them ideal for black-backgrounding. On black, the original colors — which I didn’t enhance for these variations — appear to be more luminous or phosphorescent, like, you know, things that glow in the dark. In some cases, I kept stems and leaves in the final image, something that worked when they were as well-focused as the flowers and their colors were as luminous as those of the flowers.
Here’s the full-color version of one of the photos I previously posted, whose black-background rendering is one of my favorites in this series:
To convert this to a photo with a black background, Lightroom has several tools I can pick from to select the subject, background, or individual objects in the image. Sounds great; and you might think that using the background selection tool here would recognize that all the stones are behind the plants, and the rest is in the foreground (or is the subject). But the application doesn’t think like you do, and has its own magical mystery for deciding which parts constitute the background, probably based on slight differences in focus or contrast at the pixel level that our eyes may not register. So when I ask Lightroom to select the background, here’s what it chooses…
… as indicated by the fluorescent green overlay that covers the stones but also covers some of the flower petals and leaves. If I simply convert that to black, I end up with something that, shall we say, doesn’t meet my artistic needs:
One of the steps in this workflow, then — the one that takes the most time — is to carefully mouse-erase any part of the mask that covers something I want to show in the photo. I’m not complaining, mind you — there’s something both relaxing and immersive about “un-painting” parts of these photographs to gradually reveal what I want — but having done so many of these over the years, I find it interesting that the human and the computer can’t get a little closer to each other in identifying the subject (or background) of an image.
Here you can follow the transition from background selection, to converting the background to black, then to the final image after I expose additional flower petals and the stems and leaves leading to the upper right corner. To get that result means erasing black from nearly every flower petal, leaf, and stem in the photo. Patience is a virtue here, but the final result is usually worth the effort.
It’s been about five years since the first time I tried to create these images on black backgrounds — which isn’t to suggest it’s some discovery of mine, just that I had to discover it for myself. I also had to learn how I wanted the images to end out, given that it’s easy to use several Lightroom or Photoshop tools to create blended dark backgrounds that aren’t necessarily pure black. I aim for consistently pure black for the backgrounds — a result that isn’t possible to achieve naturally. While you might be able to simulate a black background with clever placement of studio lighting or with flash photography, those techniques are likely to produce gradations of black or include reflected color from the subject onto the black sections of the photographs.
While working on this batch of photos, I suddenly remembered “Paint by Number” kits I had as a kid. I don’t know if anyone does these today, but Paint by Number was popular during the 1960s and 1970s. Each kit consisted of oil paints, brushes, and a canvas or thick cardboard printed with a numbered outline of the subject you were painting. The oil paints in the kit were numbered to match the outline — so you could pick the right color and create your own (alleged) masterpiece.
There was a variation of Paint by Number — called “Velvet Painting” — where the canvas or cardboard was covered with a stretched black velvet cloth… so you could create, for example, a painting of flowers on a black background. You had to be very patient with your brushwork, however, because the textured surface of the velvet could cause colors to bleed into each other or leave your subject with rough edges. Maybe that’s where I learned to be patient with my Lightroom work, but it was also an early visual experience that showed me what happens to our color perception when we isolate the subject of an image on a black background.
The more things change….
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
