Black and White in Color
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
2022
Every once in a while I come across a scene that looks for all practical purposes totally to be in black and white even though it’s in a full color environment (i.e. what I see with my eyes, not what I might convert it to after photographing it). That’s what I thought when I saw this portion of Mammoth Hot Springs recently. However, it was only approximately a black and white scene as witnessed by this actual black and white conversion of the same image:
It is interesting to note that although some scenes look more dramatic, more three-dimensional so to speak, when converted to black and white, that is not the case for this one. It comes across to me anyway as having more depth in color than in black and white. I actually played around with split-toning the image, which can add implied depth to an image, just to see if I could come closer to the look of the color version but did not succeed. There are a lot more subtle shades of color at work in this scene than is immediately obvious I think.