Alright in black and white
Flat light and boring skies spoiling your landscapes? Adam Waring tries ditching the colour…
A great landscape image is dependent on the weather it’s shot under, so when you’ve put in the miles to get to a hard-to-reach location only to be faced with dreary, drizzly skies that result in a lacklustre shot, you might be tempted to pack up and head straight back home again. But when an image is lacking that certain oomph, removing the colour can make all the difference. A black-and-white conversion forces the viewer to focus on tones and texture, and it’s possible to fiddle with how specific colours are rendered in mono, and push the contrast further than you normally would, to make a so-so shot really stand out.
Setting the Monochrome picture control in conjunction with Live View enables you to see-before-you-shoot. Here’s how…
Get set up for a B&W scenic shot
1 Colour me bad
Our original colour shot, straight out of the camera, isn’t particularly inspiring. The sky was overcast and the light was flat, and the resultant image lacks punch, with the grey rocks failing to stand out from the surrounding green grass. The murky conditions meant the scene was lacking in contrast, too.
2 Landscape settings
Shoot Raw+JPEG. We set an f/11 aperture for a good depth of field and our camera’s base ISO100 for the utmost image quality. In dreary conditions, this may well result in a relatively slow shutter spee
