White River Scene
I seen this serene scene of the White River from a trail that starts at Mud Mountain Road
When faced with a rushing river, a weirdly canted log, a bent tree trunk, and the texture of leafless trees, what do I expose for? The clouds.
When you shoot the sky in black and white, you can add filters to your camera to change the relative brightness of colors. In this case, I applied a red filter in development (Capture One software, this is not real B&W film). The bright blue sky becomes the darkest thing in the photo, giving huge contrast to the edges of clouds.
The rest of the image, despite being chock full of interesting details, could have gotten lost in the grays. I brought back the details, which initially had muted contrast, by ‘pushing’ the development digitally for black to medium gray values.
Pushing was a technique used with film to recover details in a too-short exposure; with digital tools, I am able to do the same thing to only a portion of the brightness range in the image. If you are curious, here is the original color shot with the same processing as the black and white image:
The image is a bit dark; that darkness works better for the B&W image, IMO. I would go brighter, more sun-shiny, for the color image:
These are the things one thinks about when ‘developing’ digital photos. It may not need time in a chemical tank, but a lot of the same ideas we have used with film can be expressed in digital.