Enchanted Rock State Wildlife Area.
Fourteen miles outside of Fredericksburg, Texas.
I'm not a big fan of black and white landscape photographs ---- for the most part. There are too many shortcuts in most image processing for the genre. I nearly always see increased contrast, "amplified" sky tonalities and very high sharpness as part of the mix. But sometimes it's fun to play with files on has shot in color, in raw, just to see what they might bring to the table as black and white images.
When I went to Enchanted Rock to hike and photograph on Wednesday last week I knew I wanted to start with color raw files no matter which direction I might finally go in. There is just so much more potential to play with the files than when one shoots solely with a monochrome camera or when using monochrome file settings in combination with Jpegs.
There was no question that the files would end up being very sharp and noise free. After all, I was shooting in Texas daylight which meant I could keep my chosen camera for the day at its lowest ISO (200) and I could use one of my sharpest and best corrected lenses for the M cameras; the Voigtlander 50mm f2.0 APO. For the majority of my photos I used f8.0 and a shutter speed of either 1/500th or 1/1,000th of a second. Not likely to be affected by user inflicted vibrations and nothing within the frames was moving.
While the lens is extremely sharp the sensor in the camera is reputed to use a very thin filter stack which translates again into even more resolution and sharpness. Very much a win, win.
When it comes to monochrome landscape shots the nature of the sky is important to the overall look. An overcast sky with no differentiating details usually looks dead in landscapes. But worst of all are the bald, white skies one sometimes gets. I felt lucky that a storm had moved through hours earlier and the sky was constantly changing which gave me a range of looks. The third and fourth frames were done early in the day when more rain was threatening. The top two images were done later in the morning as the skies started to clear.
All the files were processing in Adobe Lightroom using a simple conversion to black and white. These may be your cup of tea but they may not and that's okay. I don't profess to being a master landscape shooter nor a post production genius. I just had fun shooting the images and playing around with them in post.
