I have been working for a while with my WG-80 camera and trying to decide upon a high contrast B&W image style.  My intent was to show images with emphasis on the shapes, forms, and shadows.  I showed some of my images processed that way in my previous post.

My problems with that B&W style have been many, mostly due to available subjects.  It is difficult to make B&W images with cluttered natural scenes I see around Plum Creek, especially in the spring when we have lots of fresh, bright colors.  While I liked the above images processed in B&W I still felt like I needed to keep searching in another direction in order to overcome three issues.

A primary issue has been that red and green colors process into similar shades of black with little differentiation.  Another issue is that B&W images aren’t very modern and I keep trying to achieve renditions that are old style when I could be better utilizing the modern available technology.  The last issue is that many don’t like my B&W images, even though I don’t let that sway me much.

Because of the above issues, I decided to apply the processing techniques of my high contrast B&W processing but with colors.  I show those results in the images above.  Such processing tends to emphasize the colors to the extent that they are above and beyond being truly representative of reality, but yet they aid in showing the shapes and forms, etc. 

I am pleased in that I can capture images like these with only the use of the Ricoh WG-80 and with jpeg files when processed in Adobe Lightroom Classic software.  That is a big plus for me, so I will continue to try this technique and see if it grows on me.  

Below are how they look in B&W with slightly different exposure adjustments.