Summit County Citizens Voice

Seeing in black and white

Lone tree on Ute Pass.

FRISCO — As always, to honor Ansel Adams’ birthday, I tried to find a few shots in the archives that say something in black and white in homage to a man who not only made beautiful pictures, he also gave photography a social and environmental context.

It’s easy to get caught up in flashy colors, but a little harder for me to create an image by seeing lines, textures, balance, and most of all just pure light, and that’s what processing into black and white makes me do. It also helps me understand if an image was exposed properly to begin with.

For example, the top shot in this series was very early in the morning and the overall light was a bit washed out. I’m not completely happy with the shot, but the striking tree silhouette was strong enough to overcome some of the other weaknesses in the frame (for my taste). But the next shot (the seascape image below) has that full range of tonalities that I want when I render an image in black and white, including the almost luminous foam.

Feel free to share some of your own favorite black and white shots on the Summit Voice Facebook page. I’d love to feature some of them in a guest post.

The golden hour is the golden hour for black and white, too. This image was taken just a minute before the sun set at Pt. Montara, California.

This isn’t exactly the kind of broad landscape that Ansel Adams would usually shoot, but the light in this frame just dances around the image.

An American icon.

Morning mists along the Blue River, Breckenridge, Colorado.

Peak one.

I can’t do an Ansel Adams homage without including a moonscape!

Related articles

• Ansel Adams Exhibition London: Photography from the Mountains to the Sea (oxfordschoolofphotography.wordpress.com)
• Happy Birthday AA (theonlinephotographer.typepad.com)

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: | Ansel Adams, art, Black-and-white, Happy Birthday Ansel Adams, photography