Overcast

It was too good to be true. After a great day for our Kananaskis photo excursion, the weather turned gloomy, cool and overcast. That’s disappointing on many levels but I couldn’t overlook the cloud cover, always a nice feature for creating atmosphere in a photograph.

I took a camera with me on my daily walk, hoping to create a different look to pictures I’ve taken before under different conditions. My goal was to capture the atmosphere as I perceived it, choosing to use black and white exclusively as the right medium for the conditions.

My walks almost always take me past Canmore Creek. This scene was photographed looking downstream toward Grotto Mountain in the background.

The Bow River Bridge is another regular part of my walks, the crossing point to get into the downtown area of Canmore. This shot was taken from the shoreline before I crossed the river.

Before moving on, I took this next picture looking down the Bow River. I captured a glimpse of one of the Three Sisters Mountains in the background.

Before returning home I walked upstream along the Bow to the Engine Bridge, where I crossed again. My timing was right to find this intrepid angler, probing the shallow waters of the river for hungry trout.

Checking out the other side of the bridge I got his picture of the Fairholme Range, showing glimpses of its snow-covered peaks through the clouds.

At this point, I reversed my direction for the trek home. On my way, I walked along another of Canmore’s waterways, Spring Creek.

In concluding this post, I should say a little bit about creating black and white images. I made the choice to use black and white before I set out, but the photographs were actually taken in colour. My camera, a Fujifilm X100F will take monochrome pictures, but I prefer to shoot the images in colour and then convert them to black and white. I use specialized software to do this, Silver Efex Pro, a product of Nik Software. It’s a plug-in to both Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop and I’m able to move effortlessly among the three.

I begin by performing the basic adjustments (tone, sharpening, lens correction and cropping) to the colour images in Lightroom and/or Photoshop. I then move to Silver Efex Pro to to do the conversion to black and white. This software presents a wide range of choices for creating the appearance of the image, keeping in mind that monochrome is a vast spectrum of black, white and grey tones. Those tones are sensitive to the underlying colours and the overall appearance of the monochrome is affected by changes made to those colours. Using this software introduces tremendous versatility in crafting the final images, not achieveable in the camera alone.

I still favour colour in my photographs, so I expect my blogs will continue to reflect that, with the occasional black and white where I think it fits better than colour.