Sometimes after getting back from a road trip and looking through the pictures, I select a couple frames and convert a version black and white. High contrast, ultra sharp pictures with strong potential for black and white usually get picked for my experimentation.

The resulting pictures usually don’t show a lot of what Ansel Adams called Zone 5 - neutral gray. I like to see them showing giant swaths of Zones 0-3 and 7-10 because the higher contrast looks shiny to my eyes. I love shiny black and white.

I’m not a botanist and struggled in the botany section of Biology 11 at UC Santa Barbara. I think it was the second quarter of the introduction to biology class with about 500 students and I barely got through. With my exceptionally limited botany ability, I believe these two trees fall into the cedar category. (BTW - the first quarter consisted entirely of molds and fungi. Somehow I remember a lot of that section.)

This picture happened during one of my super productive springtime trips to the Hoh Rainforest a couple years ago. I just camped in the heart of the Hoh for three days and hiked around with a couple prime lenses and did pictures. My primes were (I think) a 24mm f2.8, a 60mm f2.8 macro, and a 100mm f2.8. I’ve never been a huge zoom user. They weigh a ton and don’t force a person to be creative and move around for the picture. You just stand there and zoom in and out for a picture. Standing in one place limits the mind to one idea. Moving forces the mind to see and ask. Digital mirrorless cameras allow lots of questions and attempts at answers cheaply, quickly, and very efficiently.

You won’t get penalized monetarily or any other way for making lots of pictures and thinking of lots of different ideas. Then when editing go ahead and experiment with what a picture might look like in black and white.

I like both of these but lean a little more towards the color because those springtime greens really light up the scene.