I decided to revisit photographs from an older trip to Baltimore, Maryland.
Melissa and I spent some time outside the B&O Railroad Museum.
I decided to go monochrome with this shot because of all the beautiful details and textures all over the two trains.
You see, color photography can be the most beautiful thing in the world. However, it has a major disadvantages to black and white photography. When converting to monochrome, a photographer has the ability to expand highlights, shadows and tones beyond the reach of a color photograph. Why? Because as you start processing and getting to the ends of certain scales, colors begin to shift to a point that is unpleasing to the eye. Skins might turn yellow or orange. Skies might go maroon or green. That’s never a good thing.
That is why when trying to process a photograph so all the amazing textures come out to the foreground, it can be best to go monochrome. When you do, there is obviously no risk for unpleasing colors. Of course, you can still make a black and white photograph look bad, but that is why I use onOne Software Perfect B&W on top of Adobe Lightroom’s controls. The combination can’t be beat.
Thanks for reading and happy shooting,
Scott
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