Great White Throne-7822a-bw-med

A B&W presentation of the Great White Throne, Zion National Park, Utah. The light

was very harsh, and the white clouds are more blown-out than I had hoped. What do

you think? I am particularly interested in comments from those of you who do more

B&W landscape work. Your thoughts and comments requested and always sincerely

appreciated.

 Just love it! Great shot.

I'm not a b/w pro by any means but the range of tones, detail, and composition look great... Mike

It definitely has a great range of tones, composition is a little too centered for my taste, but it's nice. I would love to see the variations of light on this throughout the day. 

Chris; Thank you for taking the time to view and comment.

Didier; I'm glad you like it. Your encouragement is appreciated.

Mike; Your opinion is very valuable to me. I'm encouraged that you think this is a worthy effort. Thank you for the feedback.

Anon; Thanks for weighing-in. I may agree with you regarding the composition, but I'm not sure yet. I have several alternative compositions I need to explore. I'd love to hang around and watch the light change, too, but my wife would probably drive off and leave me there to walk back to camp.;-) Thanks again.

David, I quite like this view and rendition of one of my favorite walls in Zion. The blown out clouds and nearly blown walls facing the sun come off as glowing to me. I quite like the S curve of the dark lower slope leading into the ledge coming down from the wall. 

I'm intimately familiar with this wall having done the 3rd ascent of it back in 1974. A year and a half back two of my old climbing friends guided me up a new route they put up on the south face. We had to traverse the rarely visited summit plateau so I could look down this wall. It was scary just creeping up to the edge! Here is the view I saw:

View down NW Face Throne

Jim; Thank you for your comments and feedback. As always, they are sincerely appreciated. I think I'll keep playing with this one in PP, but I'm glad you like it.

Hi David,

I really like the composition, and the cloud pattern in the sky. I like the dark mountain forming a cradle for the central peak. I would may be crop a little bit at the bottom to allow the dark edge disappear smoothly below the frame.

I am looking at this in an uncalibrated monitor. That said, the light areas in some places indeed look a bit harsh to me. I assume you have already moved the sliders to the extremes in Lightroom. I would now give it a slight shadow boost in the Curves in PS, followed by dodging the dark areas and burning the highlights to some extent. This would soften the light and also give the shadow areas the rich dark gray of silver halide prints. I took the liberty to do some adjustments myself. If viewed under proper condition, may be one will like your version better than mine. Hope to see more pictures of Zion from you!

You certainly set yourself a challenge with the prevailing light and contrasting shadows. But in all fairness the result is quite appealing.  So very well done for meeting the challenge head on! 

I would prefer to see a little more detail in the foreground and one way of achieving this would be the use of a ND grad filter, which would have also balanced the light a bit more in the top of the image and reduced the blown highlights significantly. 

You may also want to experiment with a bit of software called Nik Silver Efex Pro- 2 It really does make a big difference when processing B & W images. I use this 90% of the time when processing B & W  There are a wealth of great textures in this image which can be really brought out in the aforementioned software. 

Best Regards 

Alf 

Supriyo; I agree with your suggestion for the crop across the bottom. Your alternate PP really improves the available and visible detail, and the clouds are also improved. Thank you for the PP suggestions. The silver halide print is the look I'm going for, so your suggestions are very much appreciated. I still wonder if I should let some of the highlights on the rock face to push the bright end, if only to emphasize the directionality of the late afternoon light? Thanks, again, for your input and taking the time to share.

Alf; I'm going to try out the Nik Silver Efex software. My initial read on it is that it will be great help. Thank you for the recommendation, as well as for your comments. FYI: I left my ND grad in the truck on this walk, so fie on me. I'll eventually learn my lesson. I did apply several options in LR. I intentionally left the foreground darker so as to push the viewer's eyes up onto the formation. I'll reevaluate this approach, as the lighter foreground looks good in Supriyo's version. Thanks again.

Love it. The very white portion of the sky is a minor distraction for me. I am just learning about luminosity masks in Photoshop and it could be helpful here - I think. 

David,

In my (not so expert) opinion, having a highlight would be fine as long as there is not too sharp a boundary between the darker shades and pure white, unless it is a structural edge. I think your original image looks great in that respect, and does not suffer from the problem I mentioned.