A black and white experiment

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Chet18013

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Mar 5, 2005
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Full time in RV. Home is where we are parked
Last week we took a jet boat trip from Wrangell, AK to LaConte glacier and back. I took over 300 photos on the trip and decided to see what the glacier looked like in B&W. Here's one I like.

This glacier is fed from a huge area that funnels down to this narrow face. The location of the face has been fairly stable for the last 10 years even as the glacier moves down and calves off. The glacier's rate of forward movement and breaking off is about 75 feet per day. The water depth at the face is over 700 feet. Our guide has seen huge chunks break off and then rise up in the air several hundred feet and explode apart from the pressure release.
 

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Interesting. Did you also bracket and put it through HDR processing? The haloing in the image is very distracting and leads me to think HDR is also involved. I like the idea of b&w on something like this. Any images of just the b&w conversion without HDR? If not HDR, why so halo-y?
 
Hammster said:
Interesting. Did you also bracket and put it through HDR processing? The haloing in the image is very distracting and leads me to think HDR is also involved. I like the idea of b&w on something like this. Any images of just the b&w conversion without HDR? If not HDR, why so halo-y?

You are correct. I did process three shots as an HDR. However the haloing is more due to the fact that the day was cloudy with patches of sunlight in narrow bands that were making the glacier and ice field have bands of light and dark areas. Very unique conditions.
 
Nice, but can't you change to black and white in photoshop or some other package?  Then you have the best of both worlds  :D
 
Chet, do you have the free copy of the Nik Collection? 

I was playing with the Nik Collection a few days ago and found some B & W presets I like in the Silver Efex Pro 2 portion of the Nik Collection.  Although I was experimenting with a portrait and not a landscape, one of my favorite B & W presets for the image I was working on was "Full Dynamic (Harsh)"  There are also two presets in HDR Efex Pro 2 section of the Nik Collection.  One is for merging a multiple image series and the other is for tone mapping a single image.  My mistake was that I  customized a "recipe" for an image and really liked the result but I fortunately didn't make a new preset nor did I save the image.  :( :'(  Lesson learned, I hope.
 
The beauty of b&w is capturing light and dark and shapes. The un HDR version does that well. It's just not sharp. I hope it was ok, but I brought shadows up, increased contrast a bit, bumped up  midtones, and added just a smidge of unsharp mask to the image.
Here's what I got.

 

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Tom and Margi said:
Or, perhaps, not.

One of Ansel Adam's well-known quotes is "You don't take a photograph, you make it". 

In an exclusive interview with Ansel Adams' son Michael, he said that today his father "would be fascinated with what digital has to offer".  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pUSKskU0n8

 
The shot without the HDR would have been fine had you compensated with your exposure. You ended up underexposed from what I am looking at.  The light meter always tries to make your snow gray.  Increase the exposure about 1.5 stops and you would have a pretty nice image.
 
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