Reviewing old images: a few black and white Landscapes

1.12.2019

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.