Black and White in lightroom

2011 so far has been a rubbish year for photography for me.  I was laid up with a really nasty bought of Pneumonia at the beginning of the year  and as soon as I was feeling well the sky became a thick featureless mass of cloud.  I managed to snap my LEE big stopper into 3 bits - even though it has hardly left my bag for months. After managing a decent weeks shooting in Derbyshire I am now suffering with eye problems which make photography difficult and driving anywhere to take shots impossible.

A new collection as virtual copies

In a desperate attempt to produce some pictures, I decided to take a look at last years photos and see if they looked any good in black and white:

In Lightroom I selected every shot I took last year, which is easy enough to do as I have my pictures automatically stored into folders for each year, so it is simply a question of navigating to the correct folder and using ctrl + A to select all the images.

I then decide to create a new collection of these images as virtual copies. Virtual copies are a duplication of your picture but they don’t exist as actual photos, they are simply stored as a new set of settings in the catalog.You can create as many virtual copies of a master photo as you wish so you can have color, sepia, B&W and different crops of the same picture yet all you are storing is a recipy of yur changes to the original file.

So having created my new collection I select all of the images (ctrl+A)  and desaturate them (V).  The I selected Library>Previews>render standard size previews which will speed up the viewing process later.  This takes quite a while with an entire years images, so I left it running overnight.

Now I have a complete collection of last years shots,  so I work my way through them using the arrow key, X to mark as a reject and P for my picks.  I whittled 3,600 images down to 9 I liked in B&W which I then saved as tiffs to give some sort of permanence to the virtual images.

Below are a few of those shots I thought you might like.

Curbar Fence

Down in the Tube Station at Midnight

Dawn in the Meadows

Trebarwith Strand