Seeing in Black & White

With Spring still a month or so away, it’s a great time to practice seeing in Black & White…

With Montana’s landscape still in transition from Winter to Spring, it’s not the most inspiring at times, especially shooting in color. However, it’s a great time to practice black & white and start working on some different compositions that may allow some tolerance to the bleak landscape.

Personally I love black and white photography and many of my favorite photographers shot or shoot this medium exclusively.

When circumstances warrant, I like to make that transition from color to black & white and really start looking at light,tones and composition in a much different way.

With Photoshop now having more control than ever over how we process our black and white imagery, the possibilities seem endless.

I have begun using Photopshop’s Black & White conversion tool under Image/Adjustments. It seems to do a good job and still keeps your image in RGB form rather than Greyscale. There are a few other options as well. Converting to Greyscale in Adobe Camera Raw, or the old way of using desaturate.

Whatever the method, experiment and see what works best for the given image.

I had to run to the other end of town this morning and on my way back home, noticed the fog settling in the valley. Taking a detour home, I took advantage of the weather and captured the image above and the few below all within about a twenty minute time frame.