Winter Photography III; Color or Black And White?

Olympus E-M1 MKII, 12-40mm f/2.8 lens @ 12mm; 1/160th sec. @ f/8; ISO 200

Converted to black and white in Lightroom CC

Over some recent posts, I shared some images and wrote about my preference for black and white versus color, especially in winter.  After posting a black and white image of a different deadrise work boat from this same small harbor on the James River in southeastern Virginia, I had an inquiry about a color version of that same image.  I then posted the color image for comparison.  Some of those who commented and emailed me liked the black and white while others liked the color.  You can read and see those posts here and here.

These two images are from the same small harbor as I continue a short series on winter photography.  I decided to post both a color version and a black and white version so anyone can directly compare the two treatments.  That being said, your editing of the image may be different than mine so you may like both or you may not like either.  Its all very personal.

This image was made using the new Olympus E-M1 Mark II.  A quick comment on that camera.  I've been using it a bit to reacquaint myself with the controls, menus, quirks, settings, features, etc.  I owned the E-M1 for a couple of years and thought it was one of the best cameras I've ever owned.  It was hard to part with it.  The Mark II, its successor, basically handles and acts just like it.  Most menu options and controls are identical so the learning curve is relatively flat.  There are some new features which I have not yet gotten into, but if you are or were an E-M1 user you won't have any difficulty adapting to this camera.  So far, I'm liking it.

Last weekend I ran some very revealing tests comparing some aspects of this camera versus the Fuji X-T2.  Come back in a few days and I think you will find them very, very interesting.

One more note concerning the Mark II...

One thing I've now done on the Mark II that I've never done before with any camera is create custom settings banks.  Olympus gives you three, C1, C2 and C3.  I never thought I would need to do this, but I find it very helpful in this camera with its almost infinite number of settings available to the user to cover unlimited photographic situations.

I've created one bank for general photography based upon aperture priority and a second for wildlife, birds, moving subjects, based upon shutter priority.  I've created the third bank for everything to be automatic based upon the Program setting.  This third bank is when I hand the camera to my wife to use or to someone to take a photo of us when traveling. Everything will be instantly set and the novice photographer can't mess anything up, almost guaranteeing a satisfactory photograph.  All I have to do is rotate the command dial one click to go from C1 to C2 to C3 and all of my settings have changed. This is very helpful and convenient when time is of the essence and you may miss a photographic opportunity when you don't have the time to change a wide variety of settings.

Why haven't I done this before?  Duh!  I guess I'm slowing moving out of the photographic stone age!

Thanks for looking. Enjoy! 

Dennis A. Mook 

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