As with almost all of my current black and white photographs, this has been converted from a normal color photograph using a preset—a tool that mimics some kind of black and white film. In this case, that would be one of my all-time, old-time favorites, Tri-X 400.
Shot handheld in the woods near the Boise Creek in Enumclaw, WA a few months ago. I am looking to see how effective these color to B&W conversions are. Judging from the last few, they look surprisingly authentic.
Technical: 1/1000th of a second, ISO 100 (base), f/4
I exposed strictly for the brightest elements of the image, and let the background go to black. The idea was to isolate the bright parts as much as was reasonable, assuming that if I did want some of the background to show up, I could rely on the high dynamic range of the Sony a7r IV to allow some recovery. (I did bring the background up a tiny bit to compensate for the darkening that occurs when I post to this blog, maybe 5% or so.)
But as it turned out, the out-of-focus background added nothing interesting, so I did only minor edits to render the final version above. The biggest changes were a crop to position the bright portions of the image, and convert to B&W.
Here is the original image in color with no edits. I really like this version; the black and white is special in some ways, but the naturalness of the color version is pretty cool.