What I Am Working On: It Just Might Suprise You

A lot of my photography is outdoors with the natural world as subject matter. As a result, a lot of my photos are color images. In my mind, color is really the default. When I took this image, I was thinking in color:

ISO 400 18mm f/11 1/1000sec

This recent shot was taken on a beautiful morning along the South West Coast Path. It was a color and light filled morning, but when I went to edit this photo, I was only partially happy with the results. So, I wandered off and did some other things, kind of thinking over this edit in the back of my mind. A bit later, the back of my mind suggested I try a black and white edit.  So I did:

ISO 400 18mm f/11 1/1000sec

This is the result, which I am much happier with. When I edit a photo into black and white, the first step is usually to bump up the contrast and saturation. It makes for a terrible color image, but it usually then makes for a more interesting black and white image. Having done that, I then made my black and white edits. This has a yellow filter applied. I then applied a filter to soften the image a bit but removed it as I think the texture in the image is an interesting component, and one that I wanted to leave in.

Nature images are most often presented in color, what do you think of this in black and white? your comments are welcome below.

Cheers!

Added to Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge, Vanishing Point and Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, Creativity.

Swan Stretch

It took a while to get to the point of writing this post. The original version of this swan:

ISO 640 95mm f/11 1/500sec

Now transformed into black and white:

ISO 640 95mm f/11 1/500sec

The easy part was the edits to the photo. In Luminar I have used the eraser tool to get rid of some of the dark patches on the swan’s breast and clean up a few spots in the water. I have also cropped this image. When I applied a black and white filter, I went with a green filter.  Lastly, I applied a vignette.  All pretty basic edits. It was getting the photo back into Lightroom in its edited format that proved to be the problem. Instead of black and white, it showed as a sepia image. The most frustrating part? I still can’t figure out why, after two days of messing with it, I have a finished version that I like but still not a clue as to what was wrong with the earlier edit.

Have you ever had something go wrong with files where the root problem remains elusive? so annoying. I do like this image in black and white though, feel free to let me know what you think in the comments below.

Cheers!

Added to Cee’s Black and White Photo Challenge, In Flight.

Picfair version here.