Night flight over Miami with the Leica Academie

Last Saturday I led a Leica Acadamie Workshop on night photography. After the class we climbed into two helicopters and flew over Miami just after the sunset. I had my favorite combo of a Leica M10 camera and a 24mm f/1.4 lens. I find a 24mm wide angle gives me the best view for most of my city photography, while the f/1.4 helps to keep the ISO down and the shutter speed up. That said, I still ended up shooting most of my later photos at around ISO 3200 and 1/60 second.

            

Switching to black & white

On a recent trip to Delray Beach in Florida to photograph the sunrise, the sky and colors were disappointing so I decided to switch over to photographing it in black and white. I was using the Nikon D850. Like the Fuji, it does have a black and white mode, but I prefer to do my black and white processing mostly in Adobe Camera Raw where I can convert the image to monochrome and can actually control the monochrome darkness of each individual color in the original scene by using the sliders in the HSL/monochrome tool. Additionally, there are several different ways of fine tuning the rations of contrast and detail by using curves, clarity, dehaze, the contrast slider itself, and then fine tuning highlights and shadows with their sliders. The variations available in ACR are endless.

I usually get the image almost to where I want it but keep it just a little on the flat side so I can then fine tune the tonality with Curves and/or Levels in Photoshop.