Selenium Light

Going to a botanical garden one would think they would come home with a lot of lovely flower photos in nice bright saturated colours. Not me. In my previous trip to Van Dusen Garden my favourite photos were black and white. Today is no exception. I saw this photo and took it knowing it could not be in colour. It is my favourite of the day. Well, I think so. When I looked at this I started working on it and still have to go through the rest. I must admit I did not know what Selenium was other than a tone selection on the black and white conversion software. I thought maybe it was the colour of the tone. Lo and behold it is an element. I found this out when I looked at the Wikipedia entry. There is a lot of discussion of its presence in nature, it's industrial uses, and in electronics. It only gets a brief mention concerning photography " Selenium is used in the toning of photographic prints, and it is sold as a toner by numerous photographic manufacturers. Its use intensifies and extends the tonal range of black-and-white photographic images and improves the permanence of prints."
I chose this tone because I thought it looked good and suited the photo. Little did I know there was so much more to it. 

  I took this particular photo with the 24-70 2.8 at 70mm 1/2000th sec f2.8 iso 400