As the sun dropped lower and lower in the sky yesterday, I was struck by the way in which the light caused the cattails to glow. Many of the cattails had already burst into masses of cottony fibers and the backlighting showed them in wonderful detail and texture.
I tried to capture this beauty, but it was difficult shooting directly into the sun and I ended up with all kinds of light artifacts. Because I was mostly interested in the effects of the light, I decided to experiment this morning and converted one of the photos into black and white and played around with it (probably too much).
I think I need to read up some more on how to convert images to black and white and how to tweak them, but for now I’ll continue to enjoy the process of experimentation. I might stumble onto something really good.
Backlit cattails in the marsh
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
Like!! With black and white, they almost look like have frost on them.
Like!! Looks very nice in b&w. And I like your new profile picture! Cool 🙂
You’ve done a really nice job here, Mike–it doesn’t look like too much to me at all, but of course, I can’t follow your processing or see the original. If you plan to do a lot of monochrome conversion, I can heartily recomment Nik software’s Silver Efex Pro 2 program. Several of the photographers whose work I follow, especially Adrian Lewis (there’s a link to his website on mine) use it, and his work inspired me to add it to my digital darkroom. It’s a great program.
For the moment, I’m just dabbling with black and white, but if I delve any deeper I’ll be sure to check out Silver Efex more closely. I have heard good things about it, though I previously did not know anyone personally who used it.