Definetely not a Mercedes

When I shot this picture, I knew I was going to post-process it to Black & White. Still, I did not use my camera’s built-in B&W setting – I would not even know where to look for it, quite honestly. As always, I shot in Raw, because that gives me most flexibility afterwards, enabling me to seperately and precisely control the grayscale conversion of every individual color. Shooting with a Black & White preset on your camera is as definetely not the way to go, as the car in the picture definetely is not a Mercedes… although those rims sure tried hard to persuade me otherwise!

I also used a polarizer for this shot. A polarizer has become an essential piece of equipment for me. It weighs nothing, costs next to nothing (at least compared to your camera and lens) and it can totally change the look of your pictures, in a way post-processing can’t. It can make skies look darker, make reflections disappear, or, as in this case, maximize them. You loose a lot of light, though (4 stops), which is why I cranked the ISO up to 640. But even that loss of light can be handy for those times when you want a slower shutter speed during the day: you can actually use your polarizer as a makeshift 4-stop neutral density filter… If you don’t already have a polarizer, I’d advise you to get one. If you already have one, you know what I mean . Just pay attention when you use it on wide angle lenses, as you might get vignetting at the extreme wide focal lenghts.

I converted to Black & White using Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro plugin (I blogged about this in further detail here), which I activated from within Lightroom: I chose the ‘underexpose by 1 EV’ preset and added a couple of control points, to add some more ‘Structure ‘ (Nik’s version of what Lightroom calls ‘Clarity’) to certain areas. The whole process took only a couple of minutes. I then cropped the picture to a 2:1 crop  ratio in Lightroom, which I have added as one of my crop presets, as it is perfect for creating a double spread in a square photo album, which happens to be my favorite album type.