You Need Those Skies – A Lesson on B&W

Usually, when I am doing landscapes and the skies are less than ideal, I tend to lean with finishing my photo in B&W. This allows me to darken the sky and give it some character which is difficult in color if there are no clouds. But when you have those clouds, it can seriously add mood and drama to your photography. 

We headed down to Mono Lake in the Eastern Sierras for some sunset photography. Of course, we were facing the lake and honestly the scene wasn’t doing it for me. I turn around and bam, there were those clouds and the way the sun was skirting the hills, the shadows added character that instantly hit me… this will be awesome in B&W!

This photo was taken with the Nikon Z 7 and Nikkor Z 14-30 /4 with some modified B&W settings. The great thing is that ACR now supports the Z 7’s camera settings, so I set the camera to Monochrome using a red filter, cranking the contrast and clarity to the max to capture that shadow detail drama right in the .NEF file. This gives me an optimized color space and tone curve to work from and not having to push the sliders hard in ACR.