Mount Rainier wildflowers in black and white

Mount Rainier lends itself to the classic look of black and white in photography. While one typically thinks of the wildflowers as colorful, black and white brings out the shapes, textures and details that you can overlook in color photos. I include a gallery of the color images at the end for comparison.

The mountain is always the same, yet, at the same time, every year is unique. We visited The Mountain, as we call Mount Rainier locally, most years. This year’s trip was last week. There is still quite a bit of snow, but it is melting rapidly.

The meadows at Paradise on Mount Rainier emerging from the winter snows. — Meadows at Paradise

The big picture is always majestic, but if you look closely the details of the flowers are just as miraculous. The life in the meadows springs forth quickly to take advantage of the brief summers. Wildflowers pop up as the snow melts.

Pasque flowers are among the first to emerge from the mud left by melting snow. — Pasque flower

Many of the trees are bonsai by nature at higher elevations. — Glacier lily with a tiny tree.

The avalanche lilies emerge early with the Indian Paintbrush following on their heals. — Indian paintbrush and Avalanche lilies.

The lupines emerge a little later, after the ground has dried out a bit. — Lupines.

I posted more black and white landscapes, from this trip on my personal blog: Mountain landscapes in black and white.

Black and white photo processing using the GIMP

I used the open-source program the GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) to turn the photos to black and white. The method I used was

Load the image.
Resize the image and sharpen it (resizing usually softens an image).
Fine tune the tone and contrast using either the levels or the tone curve (black and white often looks better if the contrast is greater and the whole range from black to white is used).
Make two duplicates of the adjusted image.
For the top layer I used the Color to gray filter (Colors>Desaturate>Color to gray). Adjusting the parameters to suit the image.
On the lower layer I used the Desaturate tool (Colors>Desaturate>Desaturate). I tried all of the methods available and chose the one best suited to the photo.
For the Color to gray layer I changed the layer mode to either soft light or multiply, depending on which I preferred, and adjusted it’s opacity.
I added a vignette to some of the photos. Mostly black but one white, since the day was foggy it seemed to suit.

If you are interested in using the GIMP for black and white, here is a post I wrote about it: Black and white digital photo processing using the GIMP.

This is the gallery of the color images: