Reviewing old images: a few black and white Landscapes

My friend Dennis Mook had a motivating post on his blog this week (link) about his use of black and white renderings for landscapes.  It had me thinking about my own (rather limited) use of black and white for landscape photography.  Like most of us, I shoot digital and color.  Then, on my computer with Adobe Lightroom (Lightroom works great for me, but any software will do) I create what adobe calls “virtual copies”, to which I apply a black and white preset to see how the image will look in black and white. If I like it, I keep it.  The black and white file will then sit in my Lightroom catalog, side-by-side with the color file.  The dog-eared lower-left corner (see below) lets me know which are virtual copies, something that is helpful if you’re making multiple color copies or multiple black and white copies. So, in the case below, the color image is the original file.

It is very difficult for me to predetermine what images will look good in black and white.  Often what I think will look great in black and white will, in fact, look boring and unappealing.  There are other times when I have accidentally clicked (or hovered) over a black and white preset and have been amazed how good a photo looks in black and white.  Except for the random hovering over the preset I would never have guessed. I have come to believe that the best chances of a successful conversion is when there is a lot of contrast and/or a lot of texture or “gritty-ness”.

Lightroom has many presets for different black and white styles (for lack of a better word). In the “develop” mode in Lightroom Classic CC, these presets (there are 10 of them in the initial group, and a few more further down the panel) run down the left side.  Examples of black and white styles found in the presets are: Landscape, high contrast, punch, and low contrast.

I filtered my 40,000 images in the Lightroom catalog and was surprised to see only 150 black and white versions, over the 10 year period I have been using digital cameras for landscape photography. That’s not a lot.  But I do like many of them. 

I picked ten to post below, chronologically starting in 2007.  I enjoyed seeing how my camera selection has changed over the years.  I didn't remember that I had had so many different cameras, including Panasonic, Olympus, Nikon (just the first image and it was borrowed for our 2007 vacation), Canon, and Fujifilm.

Schwabacher Landing, Jackson WY

2007: The second day with a borrowed Nikon D40.

As I recall, full auto, jpeg.

I had no knowledge RAW.

Sailboats and Morning Haze

2008: Fujifilm Finepix F20 point and shoot

At the time this camera with its slightly larger point and shoot sensor

had nearly a "cult" following

Kayaking on the Sudbury River

2010: Canon S90 point and shoot

Same size sensor as the Finepix F20

but with more pixels as I recall

Three images above from The Canadian Rockies 

2012: Panasonic GH2 with Olympus 70-300 zoom

 Three Hemlocks

2014: Olympus E-M1 and 75mm F1.8

Lobsterboat and fog bank

2015: Olympus E-M1 and Panasonic 14-140

Blizzard Conditions

2017: Olympus E-M1 and 12-100 F4 zoom

Leaving the Mooring

2017: Olympus E-M1 and Panasonic 100-300 zoom

Photo Story: Driving Through Kansas in 1975

In the summer of 1975 I spent a couple of weeks traveling the USA with my graduate school roommate.  He’d driven to the west coast from Connecticut to deliver his younger brother to (as I recall) the University of California at Berkeley.  I, on the other hand, flew into Los Angeles for the purpose of riding shotgun for the drive back to New England in his green Mercury Capri sedan via Nevada Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and from there pretty much straight through to Massachusetts where he dropped me off. The experience was terrific… all except the night I spent hanging over a toilet in a campground in Colorado after consuming burritos and refried beens in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Silverton, CO.

"Kansas"

 Along Interstate 70 in 1975

Kodak Retina IIIC rangefinder film camera

50mm Focal Length

Kodachrome 64 (likely)

This photo represents my (unfair?) view of Kansas.  Flat as a pancake and a highway as straight (almost) as an arrow.  This photo was taken along Interstate 70. My recollection is that we were near Salina, and it was just after a thunderstorm blew through.  

One of my strange recollections is of spending the night in a campground off the highway.  We pitched the tent in a field. Usually, we would pound the tent pegs into the ground with any nearby rock.  But in Kansas we could find no rocks! Growing up in New England where farm fields are often lined by stonewalls, I found this rather amazing. I also remember it blowing like crazy all night and wondering if small dogs and young girls were flying through the air on their way to the Land of Oz.

First Nor' Easter This Year

Temperatures fell throughout the day and the wind has been significant, especially along the Massachusetts coast. I can hear the wind howling through the trees. And the snow is falling nearly horizontally. We're in the 14-18" snowfall band. Boston is reporting the first Blizzard in two years. 

I didn't even bother to go outside today. I spent the day looking through photos, staring out the window at the falling snow, and listening to my Neil Young station on Pandora. The snowblower is all gassed up, but overnight the wind-driven snow will just fill in the driveway again.  So I'll wait until tomorrow.

Just past our backyard is a forest of relatively young get maples. I'm guessing that the area was logged some 20 or 30 years ago.  I enjoy looking deep into this stand of maples on snowy days. I think the images I've captured work well when converted to black and white images. 

Here's one I took today, by standing sheltered in the doorway of our backyard screen porch. Taken at 1/100s you can see a bit of purposeful blur from the falling snow. The other settings were RAW, F8 and ISO 1250 on a mFT sensor (EM-1 and 12-100mm lens.) Processing was done in Lightroom using one of the included black and white presents.

A Few Black and White Prints From Mpix.com

I don’t do any of my own printing.  I’m actually a bit afraid to “get into it”.  I am worried that I might like it, which would mean buying an upscale printer and supplies, learning to print on different kinds of paper, learning about color profiles, etc, etc.  It would be a huge investment of time and money.  It might also be fun.

But so far I have resisted.  Instead, when I need prints I order them online from mpix.com. It is very simple, though print-purists might question the image quality that can be obtained by uploading merely an sRGB file.  But the results are beautiful.  I’ve created awesome prints as big as 20” x 30” from my m43 gear. 

I decided last week that I needed to get some black and whites done.  Each month in my local photo club, we can submit one color print and one black and white print for judging and critique.

I have a few color prints stashed away from the last time I ordered prints. However, as of last week, I had no black and white prints that I could use for the photo club. So I smiled when Mpix emailed me a note with a coupon code for 25% off all prints. (By the way, it makes sense to buy a bunch at a time because of the $8 flat shipping charge.)

It seems to me that a 25% discount is offered several times each year at Mpix, though I don't think it is possible to predict when that will be.  If you are interested, get on their mailing list so you will know when it happens! Last year I even bought several 20 x 30" prints during a 50% off sale.  That is quite a substantial savings, as the full retail price for a 20 x 30" color print is $32.39.

Below are the four black and whites I ordered last week. The first and last ones were printed at 10 x 15" (full retail would be $7.69), the bridge photo was printed at 11 x 14" (full retail would be $7.49) and the square image was printed on 10 x 10" paper (full retail would be $4.59).

The turnaround time at Mpix is very fast. I ordered my prints on Wednesday, they were shipped from Kansas on Thursday via 2 day Priority Mail, and they were delivered to my office in Massachusetts on Monday.  The prints were packed flat and sandwiched in heavy cardboard all surrounded in plastic, inside a sturdy flat box.  I have used Mpix for nearly 10 years and have only once had a problem with a print, a problem which Mpix quickly solved (re-printed) at no charge.

Penobscot Bay from Weir Cove, Maine

Chowder and Sandwiches, Stonington, Maine

Old North Bridge, Concord, MA

Mount Saint Helens, Washington

Black and White:Nik Silver Efex Pro:The Bow River

This image has been growing on me.  It is one of several black and whites (actually all were color images converted to black and white after the fact) that I captured one day in June, 2012 while driving south from Jasper, Alberta to Lake Louise.  The day was dark and dreary and the original color image was really rather drab... so it was perfect for experimenting with a black and white conversion.

 

The image above is the black and white as it was first created within Lightroom.  It was just a matter of clicking the button labeled "black and white". I liked it enough to submit it as a 10" x 15" print to my photo club for our February salon.  It received a nice score from the salon judge, Don Toothaker, so maybe that's why the image is growing on me!

However, always helpful, Don did suggest that I play a bit with the sky and background mountains to try to get more detail from that area of the image.  I thought it would be hard to do, because my recollection was that it was quite misty in the distance.  But when I got home from the salon, I opened the image in Lightroom and saw that I had never really done anything to the picture except click on the black and white button, and everything else was set at the usual Lightroom defaults.  I do own Nik filters and was surprised I hadn't tried any of them.  So, before going to bed, I exported the RAW file to Nik Silver Efex Pro as a 16-bit TIFF file and simply clicked on several of the 20 or so presets to find one I liked.  The presets are great.  You can start with any one preset and then make adjustments using a number of sliders. In this case I chose "high key", hit the "okay" button, and the image file popped back into Lightroom.  Simple and sweet.

I'm not sure whether this is what Don had in mind or not, but I absolutely love the result, and I thank him for his suggestion. 



Photoshop CS5 "Content Aware": Sunwapta Falls Revisited

In my last post I showed the following image and lamented about how unfortunate it was that the top tree across the gorge ran right through the middle of the image.  This is Sunwapta Falls in Alberta, Canada.



Of course, it is not the tree's fault that it bisects the image.  Unfortunately, it also runs right through the bottom of the waterfall.

My solution in the last post was to try a bit of cropping off the bottom so as to move the trees down from the middle of the image.  This was accomplished by cropping with a 4:3 aspect ratio instead of 3:2.  But the fact remains that the top tree runs through the bottom of the waterfall.

Since I have little proficiency in photoshop, I figured this was the best I could do.  But I tried using "Content Aware" in PS5.  It was amazing.  In a total of 10 minutes I was able to remove the tree in question plus another small fallen tree on the right, near the top of the waterfall.  I even removed much of the chain link fence that is at the top of the waterfall on the left.

I like the result much better:



Now I need to decide if cropping at the bottom as shown in the image below, strengthens the image. 

What do you think?



Another Black and White, Sunwapta Falls

After posting a few black and white images the other day (prior post), I found this shot of Sunwapta Falls in Alberta, Canada in my summer vacation folder and decided to convert it to black and white.  I like the result. 



I do wish the fallen tree in the middle weren't there.  My photoshop skills aren't at a level where I can remove this, though I might just for fun see what the "content aware" tool in Photoshop CS5 will do.

The fallen tree at the bottom has more character and does not interfere with the main part of the waterfall.  Or, does it?  Maybe it, too, is distracting?

I dislike having that first tree in the middle so much that I created a second crop where I was willing to nearly eliminate the bushier tree at the bottom just so I could at least move the top tree away from the center of the image and into the 1/3 position.  I find it less distracting there.



Nevertheless, I haven't decided which of the two I like better.  Note that the first image is a 3:2 aspect ratio image and the second one is 4:3, just a bit "square-er".

Either way, I do like the exposure.  I haven't mastered the "soft" waterfall look mainly because I don't like tripods, and a very slow shutter speed is required.  However, in this case, using shutter priority I set the camera at 1/15th second and held the camera on top of a wood railing on the bridge on which I was standing.  Base ISO on this camera is 200 and the camera chose F22.  If there had been any more light, I would have been out of luck as F22 is the smallest aperture on this lens.  I do have a Neutral Density filter but not for the 67mm threads on this Olympus 14-54mm lens. 

A neutral density filter would have allowed me to try an even slower speed, such as 1/8th.  Thinking back to this scene, I should have tried 1/8th anyway.  Though it would have resulted in a slightly overexposed image, the various adjustment sliders in Lightroom might have helped me pull back the exposure of the brightest areas.

A few black and whites from the Canadian Rockies

I've been trying to find some photographs from our Canadian Rockies trip last June that will convert nicely to black and white.  It is very hard for me to determine what will look good... until I try.


Biker's Solitude

"Trying" is easy in Lightroom.  First I make sure that the "Navigator" feature is open.  It is located at the top of the left hand panel.  Then, below the navigator, is the "Presets" feature. I hover the cursor over the various "Lightroom B&W Filter Presets" and watch how the image in the Navigator changes. If the image has potential, I then create a "Virtual Copy" of the original color image and click on the preset to apply it to the virtual copy.  You can then tweak the various sliders on the right hand tool panel to see if you can improve on the preset defaults.  Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't.

The Vermilion River, Kootenay National Park, British Columbia



I think all of these images were taken on  rainy, cloudy, and/or foggy days.  It is my experience that dramatic skies come across well as black and whites.  Another thing about drab days is that the colors are rather muted (boring?), so converting to black and white makes sense.



A Rainy Day Around Banff

All of these were taken in RAW format with either a Panasonic GH2 (since sold) or an Olympus E-M5.  The lens was always the Olympus 14-54II attached to the camera via a 43-to-m43 adapter.

Pyramid Lake, Jasper Alberta

Bow River, Jasper National Park, Alberta

David Thompson Wilderness

Near Athabasca Pass, Canadian Rockies

Bow River, Jasper National Park