Creating Mood with Black and White
I've also included some color examples, but I would like to show that black and white is a language well worth learning.
The mood of the photo above is bold, it really speaks to the visual power of the mountain. Instead of just doing a direct conversion to black and white, I used a virtual orange filter to make blues and greens darker (but not super dark—a red filter will do that for you).
(Yep, back in the day when black and white film was mostly what people used, you could buy colored filters and put them on your camera to get effects like this.)
I could also take a soft, sentimental approach to this very same shot by using different digital settings:
This photo emphasizes something that was present in the original full-color shot: haze. This is created by two things: moisture in the air (lots of it early in the morning, as overnight temps have made the humidity very high), and forward scattering of sunlight by that water-laden air. The layers of trees and hills are suddenly put into very exact proportion by how much they are softened and brightens by the intervening layers of air. The mass of the mountain is unchanged, but the feel of the photo is very different.
So what was the original scene? here is the raw shot—deliberately under-exposed to preserve detail in bright highlights.
The image looks like mud, but the exposure was carefully chosen to preserve the very darkest details so I could play with them during digital development.
Later on, I also zoomed out to take photos that show more of the foreground. The shot below is in color, and I made a few changes to affect the feel of the shot. The aperture was f/16, which puts more of the image into the focus zone. The exposure was a little brighter, so I can get the same effect I got with the softer black and white shot, but in color this time. I carefully adjusted the framing to give the foreground one-third of the shot, for visual balance. The image remains somewhat underexposed to prevent the mountain from washing out—although a washed-out mountain is yet another mood you can create with digital processing.
I used a zoom lens to get these various creative views of the scene, the Sony 70-200 f/2.8 II. It’s a really sharp lens, extremely flexible for landscape and portrait. Highly recommended.
All of these photos are essentially the ‘same’ photo, with different zoom levels, different processing, and different ideas behind them.