Pokhara is a famous destination as a launch point for travelers to spend weeks trekking the Himalayas. With only several days to stop by, we didn't have time for a proper trek, but had plenty of time to hike about and take in some of the spectacular scenery.
The deceptive thing about this landscape is that without anything for scale you really have no sense of how massive these mountains really are. The peaks in the image are over 23,500 feet tall. The altitude I am making these images is probably only 3,500 feet. The peaks are roughly 30 miles away and there is a tiny paraglider in the bottom center of the image, probably at about 5,500 feet and probably only 2 miles from us.
The conversion to black and white was done using Nik Silver Efx Pro 2.0 which is a really great black and white plug in for Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture. The density of the sky was so blue even without the use of a polarizer, that the black and white conversion came pretty easily with a dark sky without much manipulation. In this case the key was to use the software equivalent of a red filter on the camera, which makes the blue tones, blacker.
Certain images tend to lend themselves really well to black and white. This image was one because there was nice contrast from the snow and the clouds against the sky. In the original image the intense blue color hues overpower the form of the clouds and mountains. But when the color is removed now our focus shifts to the contrast of the clouds and mountains against the sky for something a little more striking. I have included the original image below for comparative purposes.
This image was taken with the Tamron SP 70-200 f2.8 VC. The focal length was 70mm and the aperture was set at f7.1 at 1/640th of a second.
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