Going Monochrome
View of Mt. Hood from Trillium Lake, February 2017. © 2017, Carlo Delumpa Photography.
I love color. Full stop. That's why I got into photography all those years back. Kodachrome, Ektachrome, Velvia - I actually think I appreciated the color rendering of those films as much as I loved the subject matter I was shooting. I remember sending my film off to be processed at Kodak Labs on Sand Hill Boulevard in Palo Alto, California then waiting with high anticipation to see if the photos "turned out okay". Most times, I remember being floored with how amazing the colors looked, especially when I started using Fuji Velvia slide film for my landscape shoots.
Fast forward to now and the myriad ways that you can process a digital photograph - for professionals, we tend to stay away from the Instagram-y renderings that have become so popular and ubiquitous (unless we're just having fun of course). We still, however, look to tease out the best contrast, color and sharpness we can that most closely re-creates the scene as we saw it with our own eyes. But what happens when the light conditions don't yield a photograph that you'd be proud to put on your website or hang on your wall? One idea is to process the heck out of the image and go for something painterly, or otherworldly.
Check out the photograph above - it was from a sunrise shoot at Trillium Lake in Central Oregon. My friends and I got up at 3am and drove from Portland to catch what we were hoping would be a spectacular sunrise. Instead, we had a cloudless sky, save for the nice thick blanked hovering behind Mt. Hood that squashed any chance of dimensional, color-filled skies. The scene was still really beautiful, but the light didn't really look like I rendered it in the photo above; it was actually a lot flatter and the colder.
Using various settings in Lightroom, I teased out whatever remaining pink was left in the sunrise by jockeying my white balance settings I pumped up the contrast in the shadows. I saturated the greens a bit more. But you know something? Although the image turned out okay, the scene didn't really look like that.
Yeah, I know, it's art and I can claim "interpretation" for my artistic ambitions. And believe me, I'm not shy about pushing the envelope in post-production processing to achieve and effect. But it didn't really look like that on that day at that time at that place. And because it didn't look that way, I didn't really get the same feeling looking at the photograph as I did when I was standing right there at the scene.
What did it really look like? It was cold. The light was flat, which means the colors were flat too. The trees still had that dark green "don't bug me I'm hibernating" hue to them. And the sky was rather featureless. Plus. my fingers were starting to freeze and my feet were cold. That's the scene I remembered, but how to render it artistically in a way that was true to my memory?
That's when I remember the magic button in Lightroom, "Black and White", in the Basic panel right under the Adjustment Brush. One press of that button and I was transported right back to the spot where I shot the image, looking at the photograph on the screen that looked like the memory I had in my head. The light looks cold, but the figures have dimension. The frosted trees in the foreground now make an interesting counterpoint to the mountain in the background. The scene shows both the majesty of Mt. Hood, but also the stark, cold reality of the wilderness, where the little plant in the lower right corner is struggling to survive.
Technically, it was simple execution - I dialed back all the color adjustments I made in the first photo above. Then I adjusted my Tone Curve, Highlights and Shadows settings to ensure three things - 1) I have a true white area in the photo (the east slope of Mt.Hood - we're looking north), 2) I have a true black in the photo (the shadows in the trees) and 3) I have a balance of tones in between true black and true white. It's kinda the Zone System without hours of analysis.
Black and White rendition of the opening photograph. © 2017 Carlo Delumpa Photography.
When I look at the resulting photograph, it appears to me to be a closer representation - and yes, a reasonable facsimile - of the scene my colleagues and I encounter that morning. Because even in the worst lighting conditions, nature still holds some mystery that she's inviting you to discover. Maybe if I had been more attentive (read, awake and three coffees into the morning) I would have remembered to change my camera settings in the field to Monochrome and shot the scene as if I were taking a black and white photograph. I'll try to remember that next time. 😉 Sure, I'd rather have captured the scene as it appeared in front of me in-camera. I just feel lucky lucky we live in a time where we have the tools to salvage what could have been a disappointing day.