Black and White Clouds

Originally uploaded by dgmiami

While reviewing over 1,300 photos I had taken during my 1-week cruise to Alaska last week, I found that I was not totally happy with the way some of the pictures turned out. I wasn’t being overly critical, I wasn’t really being picky, I just found that the colors were not as vibrant as I was used to seeing in my pictures.

If you have traveled through places like Seattle, Washington and maybe even taken an Alaskan cruise yourself, you will find that it is an inherent issue with shooting pictures in these areas simply due to the dull, gray sky that seems to follow you everywhere your camera goes. My original intention was to take multiple exposures of these spectacular landscapes so I could create some great HDR images. However, since I was shooting from a moving platform, the software wasn’t doing much of a job to match up features to create a nice image.

I then started tinkering with converting some of my images over to black and white and tweaking levels to bring out the details I was looking to highlight in an HDR process. I found some presets to make my life easier and found that I could transform a mediocre (in my opinion) shot, to something quite dramatic – with just a few clicks!

If you find yourself unsatisfied with some of the pictures you have taken in this type of environment, give gray scale, or black and white a shot. You may be pleasantly surprised with the detail that is brought out to make up for the color that you otherwise were not happy with.

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