"Frozen-in Black and White"

This past Saturday, we (my hubby and I) went out for a full day of shooting in the field. We made a big loop, from Horseshoe Bend, to Lowman, to Idaho City and home again. We get something called an inversion in the wintertime, here in the Treasure Valley. Very cold air and smog gets trapped in the valley until a strong enough storm comes along and forces the high pressure system out of our area.

In the meantime, you have to drive up to the mountains to get out of it and see the blue sky. I am posting some images from the frozen part of our drive, both coming and going. I took most of these with the idea of converting them to black and white because I could tell they would look great in black and white. I then added the white vignetting to the image.

Before we left, I told my hubby that I just wanted to drive and see what I could see and stop when I saw something I wanted to photograph, so he knew we would stop often. Our first stop came about as we drove over the hill and headed down in to Horseshoe Bend. It was quite foggy and on the right side of the road, I noticed a little patch of trees and had my husband stop the car.

Due to the conditions, everything was pretty much covered in hoar frost and very gloomy looking, rather depressing if it were to drag on for weeks at a time. Anyway, I shot the scene you see above at that location. I knew that the texture of the tree trunk, branches and hoar frost would really be a nice contrast against the soft rolling hills in the background; especially in black and white.

I took the image above at the same stop. Grasses of some sort, all covered with hoar frost. Even though these are so very frozen, they just look joyful to me. They made me smile. After several more shots, including some of ice that I haven't processed or posted yet, I was about frozen myself, so we moved on.

As we drove higher and higher in elevation, the sun began to burn through the thick haze and hit the tips of the trees. For some reason I was seeing in black and white that day and knew that we must stop for some shots of this.

I just loved the way the haze looked more like smoke and the rays of sun lit up the treetops, as if on fire. I took many more shots at this location and I hope to post some more of them but this is it for now.

As we descended, we began to see the hoar frost returning and it was bitter cold as the sun dropped down behind the mountains. We stopped near a helipad on a road that was really just a sheet of ice and that's where I shot this fence. I'm fairly new to this black and white conversion, so I hope I'm doing a good job of it.

Well, that's all for now, but I hope to post another blog showing some of the color images I shot that day. Maybe some that look a little warmer with the blue sky and sunshine. Until next time...