Project 38: burning in the sky

Although I work in digital I have decided to have a go at these next black and white projects, especially as my choice of photographer for assignments 4 and 5 is Ansel Adams and I shall therefore be working in black and white for assignment 5.

For this first image I worked on one that I took in Derbyshire at New Year 2013.  It was a showery day with brief spells of wonderful light.

As we returned to Hartington along the side of the valley towards the end of our walk, I could see that there were wonderful shafts of light passing at right angles across the valley as the stiff breeze kept the clouds moving quickly.  I took a few images and this is one that I have not processed.  It can be seen that the sky is overexposed and shows no detail.

This second image was converted to black and white in Lightroom.  Rather than working in photoshop and  using the burn tool on the sky, I continued to work in Lightroom selectively using the ND Grad facility on the sky to balance the tones.  I also decresed the highlights a little and incresed the contrast in the sky.  I then increased the contrast in the whjole image slightly and added some clarity.

This an image taken last July close to home on Tetney Marshes.  The clouds and lighting were superb on this particular evening and I decided to make the sky the subject of the image.  I first processed the colour image in Lightroom and then converted the image to Black and White and increased the contrast in the whole image.  The clouds in the top right were now much too dark so I used an angled ND grad to lighten that corner of the sky a little.  The base of clouds was too light so I used an ND grad from the bottom top darken them but this made the foreground too dark so I used a second one to lighten the sky again.  Finally I increased the clarity of the whole image slightly.

What Have I learned?

It is possible with digital photography to create Black and White Images either in camera or in post processing.  Not all conversions from colour work and it is useful to try and 'see in Black and White' in the first instance - not easy in this day of colour photography.  Some shots that I thought would make excellent dramatic Black and Whit Images just didn't work, yet the same scene under different lighting has made an excellent image.  In post processing there are several ways of achieving the same end.  There are even software packages such Nik Silver Efex Pro that are designed specifically to process Black and White.