Winter Photography

Winter Swamp (click to enlarge)
X-T2, 16-55mm f/2.8 lens @ 22mm; 1/80th sec. @ f/11; ISO 200

For me, the cold, dreary and mostly colorless months of the winter season are much more photographically difficult than any of the other three seasons.  Short, cold, many overcast dreary days, not much snow to brighten the day, etc. During winter, I find myself creating images in black and white much more often than in color.  During the other three seasons, I often find myself making an image just because of the color.

I guess I am lucky in that I "grew up" in photography almost exclusively using black and white film.  We talk about "seeing" in black and white and I buy into that.  If you don't learn the difference, you will be disappointed in your resulting images.

For example, opposite colors can look identical in black and white images. Complimentary colors can suffer the same fate.  The color in and of itself in color photography provides the difference and separation but in black and white photography, it is the luminance or brightness level of that color that provides the difference.  In the film days, different films recorded the color spectrum differently so colors were rendered differently.  In some films blue skies were very bright and in others, relatively darker.  You had to learn your film so you could anticipate how an individual color would be represented in the final black and white image.

Try this.  If you are a Lightroom or Photoshop user, go into the develop module (Camera Raw filter with Photoshop) and into the HSL panel.  Click on the Black and White tab and watch your color disappear.  You image is still in color, but is only rendered in black and white.  Now start playing with the sliders.  You can pretty much adjust the sliders to make the image look any way you want.  You can make the blues render black or white.  You can make any other color do just about the same.  What does this show?  It shows you that color in itself doesn't matter as color goes and color is.  What matters is the brightness of those colors, especially in adjacent objects.

That is what seeing and black and white involves.  As I mentioned above, you learned how your film rendered colors on the negative and used colored filters to change those renderings. In the modern digital world, we can pretty much render them as we see fit. But the principle is still the same.  You have to look at a subject, mentally remove the color from the subject in your mind and judge how light or dark the subject will be and how it will render next to adjacent objects. What you don't want is for two objects, side by side, to have the same luminance and blend together when rendered in black and white.

There are many, many books, You Tube videos, etc., on seeing in black and white.  If this subject interests you, I encourage you to pursue it.  I know that B and H Photo has a couple of You Tube videos out there on black and white photography that go into this subject.

But I have digressed terribly.

The other day, I needed to get out of the house and just wander.  That is not unusual for me.  As frequent readers of this blog know (and the origin of the name), wandering around the back roads and looking for interesting images is one of my favorite pastimes.  This is exactly what I did.  I grabbed my X-T2 and a couple of lenses and headed out.

I found myself in the Yorktown Battlefield National Park.  There is a particular small road that most don't know exits, that I enjoy driving slowly and just looking for wildlife, interesting landscapes, etc.  There is an interesting little bridge over a swamp tucked away back in the woods.  I had seen it numerous times, but never was able to visually figure out what kind of image I wanted to make of it.  However, because it is now winter and all of the leaves are gone, as I drove by it, a black and white image began to visualize in my brain.

The sun was low to my left as I drove the small one-way single lane road.  The swamp to the right was filled with living and dead trees, none with leaves.  Many of the dead trees still stood in the water, but their bark seemed particularly white, possibly bleached by the sun over years of just standing without life.  The trees in the far background, were darker and surrounded by some brush.  What I visualized was a black and white image, high contrast, showing the starkness of the white trees against the darker, background trees, all standing in black water.  The image at the top of this post is the result.  The file was edited in Lightroom and converted in NIK Silver Efex 2.

I set my aperture at f/11 as I wanted everything to be in focus from front to back.  The problem with everything in focus is the chaos of the scene.  I wanted to emphasize the whitish trees and de-emphasize the background trees.  To do that I increased the difference between the light and dark to provide more separation and reduce the chaos of hundreds of trees mostly having the same tonality.  In the end, I liked the image and purposely kept it dark and somewhat foreboding as was my original visualization of the scene.

During the summer, spring and fall, the color of the trees, leaves, water, sky reflecting in the water, etc. got in my way of visualizing an image of this small swamp.  Only during winter did it come together for me in the fact that most color had been stripped away and I realized that I needed to look at the scene with my "black and white" eyes and not my color vision. 

This also works both ways.  Sometimes an image doesn't work well in color but by converting to black and white it works much better and sometimes an image doesn't work well in black and white at all and keeping it color is a better choice.  It is all about visualization and seeing both in color and black and white.

Thanks for looking. Enjoy! 

Dennis A. Mook 

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