Rays in the Forest
Last March I had a portfolio review with the photo editor for National Geographic’s Kids and Little Kids magazines. It was quite a critique and I came away vowing to try and create new and different images. If you have seen any of my work from Costa Rica this summer, you will see I am trying a lot of new things, yet still doing some of what I used to do. Over the next few weeks and months, I will be posting some of that work and I think you will find that it is definitely quite different from my usual work and I hope proves to be somewhat unique.
In my pursuit of seeing the world in new ways, I have a bit of an itch to return to working in black and white. This all started a couple weeks ago when I began a project documenting the impact of Hurricane Ike on the refuges and reserves of the Upper Texas Coast. Witnessing and photographing both the destruction of towns and transformation of natural areas got me seeing in black and white. I will be posting some of those images in the next few days.
I must confess though, credit for the idea of converting the above image to B&W must go to my girlfriend, Carrie. She and I spent sunrise on Sunday morning wandering around a local park here in College Station. She is making an effort to learn more about photography, so we both were wandering with cameras when we were presented with this scene. We both took some nice images, but it was only when I was showing her the basics of raw processing in Adobe Camera Raw, that she tried converting one of her images to B&W.
Tonight, while waiting for some batch processing to complete, I decided to give it a try myself. Playing with Photoshop CS3’s black and white adjustment layer is a dream compared to the old channel mixer and I am fairly pleased with the result. I gave it a slightly warm tone that I think fits the mood fairly well. If I am not careful, I may find myself carrying around the 4×5 with some black and white film here shortly!
Tags: b&w, forest, landscapes, sunrise
