Project 52: Week 5; Landscape – Black & White

It’s Project 52 day again. Yes try to contain your excitement for a brief moment while I explain this week’s brief; Landscape – Black & White.

As many of you already know I shot a lot of black & white film and my street photography is pretty much exclusively in black & white as well, but when I shoot landscape’s I do not tend to go down that route. Why? Well I like big, bold, contrasty colours. I like sunset’s, I like long exposure’s of water and clouds darting across overcast skies. Basically I like to set up my tripod with my Nikon and big ol’ Sigma lens and take longer and longer exposure’s in peace and quiet, usually on a deserted beach or up a lonely mountaintop. What I don’t tend to do is shoot monochrome landscapes handheld with my Olympus when I’m on a day-trip, which is exactly what I did here.

Now this may or may not be cheating, I mean the brief said a black and white landscape it didn’t say I had to specifically go out with that in mind. So what I’ve done is converted an image I took earlier, not too much earlier as technically it was this week (Monday to be exact), into monochrome and gone with it. So below is the result of that.

 Olympus OM-D EM-5, 17mm M.Zuiko 1:1.8, ISO 400, F4, 1/80th Sec.

what do you think? I’m relatively satisfied with it. In all honesty I think I could’ve done a lot better had I the time to devote to the challenge this week but for a rush job I think it’s OK. I took this photograph across the Thames in London standing in front of the Tower of London, not to far from Tower Bridge. The Shard is the main tower in the centre, thrusting into the cloudy sky, it’s shadow casting down the centre of the image across the water. I darkened the red’s, magenta’s and blue’s in Photoshop in order to make this a much more dramatic and moody image as the original in colour is actually quite colourful and bright with a beautiful sunset sky.

If you’d like to let me know your opinion’s or ask any question’s please do in the comments below, and if you’d like to see what this would look like in colour (or at least an image taken at the same time and place) check out this previous post here.