Go for atmosphere

Buck the craze for having crisp, clear distances in landscapes, and work with receding tones

Control hues in your black and white photography and you can alter the sense of depth in a landscape shot. The technique relies on passing or blocking blue light, which increases with depth of atmosphere. The analogue method was to use a blue filter over the lens. The digital version follows the same principle, but offers more control, and you can choose to use it during processing, you don’t have to do it at the moment of capture.

Given the choice, most people seem to have a natural reaction towards heightening contrast, probably because it has the effect of making images appear clearer. However, going in the opposite direction, expanding the aerial perspective, can also expand the sense of scale in a landscape, and gives a more delicate result.

For this sunrise view over the Burmese ruins of Bagan, the distinct blue that suffuses the atmosphere made this treatment a natural choice. I raised the blue and cyan sliders in Photoshop, while lowering the red to darken the brickwork of the pagoda. However, because the foreground trees also contain cyan, they needed to be treated selectively, by lowering the cyan slider, so that they appear darker.

Sunrise over Bagan in Myanmar — in its original colour, as a black and white default conversion, and, as a main image treated for atmospheric depth