Back to black and white with this winter scene. We continue to explore post-processing to black and white. We photograph in RAW. In Aperture, we desaturate. The in the Curves brick, we pull the red curve north, the blue curve south. We desaturate again, using the Saturation brush applied to the entire photograph. Then we play some more with other contrast settings. In this case, we wanted to pull some detail out of the deep shadow in the center of the waterfall. There was not much available to work with, but we got a little detail out of it. We finished with some sharpening. Adding grain seems to be popular, but I favor the sharper Ansel Adams look, at least in this shot. I also like the grays in the trees, reminiscent of the look of silver-based black and white plates.
I have also added a black background to the post to bring out the grays I just worked so hard to perfect.
The camera used was our trusty Nikon D90. The lens was our trusty best-value Nikon 18-55mm AF-S VR kit lens. I stopped all the way to f/22 and brought the ISO down to 200, mainly to achieve a slow enough shutter speed of 1/15 second to get some blur in the small amount of water going over the waterfall. It also largely turned the light snowflakes falling at the same time into short streaks that are only visible in the darkness of the waterfall. I wanted to emphasize the long vertical lines of the icicles; the streaks from the water and snowflakes feed into that. I also had to stand pretty far off the waterfall because footing was not good to get closer, so we’re looking from the end of the 55mm zoom.
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