Las Vegas Freeway View
This image was taken out the window of my rental car as I was stuck in traffic on the outskirts of Las Vegas (Note to those concerned about safe driving: my car and all the cars around me were completely stopped when the image was made). The starkness of the scene and the overwhelming blue of the vast sky seemed like a painting to me as I slowly passed by. If I had enough wall space at my home, I would make a really large print of this.
The image works equally well in black & white (see below) and this brings up an issue experienced by many digital photographers. When do you leave the shot in color and when do you convert to black and white? There is no clear answer, of course. If you have a clear idea of the image in either color or black and white when you take the photo, then I feel you should honor that initial vision. There are times, however, when an image photographed with a certain presentation in mind, ends up being treated entirely differently once we get our hands on the pixels in Photoshop.
Therein lies one of the problems with the freedom and flexibility of working with images in a digital form. When is it finished? Where do you stop? When you are new to all the possibilities of the software, these can be hard questions to answer, since it is so tempting to try out all the different filters and effects.
Once you become more experienced, both as a photographer and working in the digital darkroom, it becomes easier for the image you saw in the camera viewfinder to survive the editing process without being transformed into something else along the way (not that there is anything inherently wrong with an image being totally transformed). When I work on a photograph in Photoshop, beyond modifications in brightness, contrast, tone, and basic color correction, I usually do not change the captured image very much from the image I first saw as I looked through the camera viewfinder. There are exceptions to this, of course, especially if I am creating images for photo illustration (and some of those altered images will eventually be posted to this blog now and then).
As to whether this image works better in color or in black and white, that is a very subjective decision and the answer will vary from person to person. Since this image is (as yet) not part of any existing or on-going series, its tonal fate is still up in the air. I do like it as a black and white, but there is something very tempting about all that blue...
In a future post, I will discuss other aspects of color and black and white, including some of the different ways to create a black and white image from a color original.
