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

The view from atop Sulphur Mountain, Banff, Alberta, Canada

The submission of the panorama below (the third picture below) to my photo club's November Salon caused me to go back to my pictures from June of this year to look again at the images I took atop Sulphur Mountain. 

It had rained the previous day and through the night.  But in the morning the clouds began to break apart and we could see that it had snowed at the high elevations.  As it turned out, the top of Sulphur Mountain had about 3 inches of fresh snow.

We took one of the early gondola rides to the top, as we worried that the clouds would return.  Fortunately, we had plenty of warm clothes.  We knew before arriving in the Canadian Rockies that June could be a cold month and that snow should be anticipated.

[Larger Images: click on any of these images to see as large as 1600 x 1200 depending on your monitor.]





The panorama below was spliced together from four individual images.  If you look carefully you can see the Canadian flag on a flagpole next to the gondola station.  The pictures for the panorama were taken about half way along a very nice boardwalk that connects the gondola terminal to an observation building. 

 

In two of the images below you can see the town of Banff. The river that runs through town is the Bow River. You can't tell from the pictures, but the Bow River was raging well above its banks. Rains had been heavy but this is also a time of snow melt in the mountains.  You can easily see the brown color of the water.