I do sometimes edit my photography multiple times. That’s the beauty of digital photography, it is very easy to create several variations of an image without incurring a huge cost, it’s just an investment of time. This morning I began with this image, taken at Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny:
If you are a regular reader, you may remember this edit:
I wrote about it a few months ago, that edit was about creating a vintage, almost impressionist feel. This morning I was revisiting with the thought of creating a black and white version. It’s an idea I had worked on a few months ago and come up with this version:
I wasn’t crazy about it, so instead, I blogged about the color version and decided to let the black and white idea sit for a while. This morning I was back at it, and here is the result:
Much better in my opinion. This time I started with a green filter, interesting because that is what improved the sky quite a bit. As I am writing this, it occurs to me that maybe I could have tried a graduated filter with this edit and that might have done quite nice things for the sky. I also darkened the whites in the image and lightened the blacks a bit.
With this edit, there were two things I really wanted to do. One was to improve the sky, make it more interesting. The second was to retain the reflections of the trees and vegetation in the water. Do you think that has happened with this edit? Feel free to leave a comment below. Have thoughts or tips on using a graduated filter on a black and white photo, I would be interested to hear about that as well.
Cheers!
Added to Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: Mirror Images or Reflections.