Mt Whitney in Black and White

August 27th, 2009

My interest in black and white photography began when I saw Ansel Adams famous “Moon and Half Dome” image for the first time. I was amazed by the dynamic contrast of Half Dome, the shadows and the sky. I always dreamed of creating images like that, but setting up a darkroom and learning the art of black and white photography wasn’t possible for me.

Then along came the digital darkroom and my dreams began to come true. Though I’ve been working with Photoshop for almost 10 years now, it wasn’t until this last winter that I began playing around with black and white. What I’ve discovered is a whole new world for my artistic expressions to bloom in. I’ve also found that many of my images that didn’t quite make it in color, can be turned into very dynamic black and white images. This Mt Whitney image is a perfect example.

This image was shot from the Whitney Portal Road. The camera I was using at the time was a Minolta DiMAGE A2. The lens on the A2 is a fixed 28-210mm zoom lens. I have an additional lens that screws on to the main lens and takes it up to 400mm. To get the composition that I wanted I ended up shooting this at 300mm.

For the conversion to black and white I used Photoshop. Within Photoshop I used a combination of adjustment layers, layers mask and the burn tool to get the final image.

Photo Details:
Minolta DiMAGE A2
Fixed zoom lens 28-210mm with telephoto lens extension.
Shot at 300mm
ISO 64
f/11 at 1/200 sec
Tripod mounted

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