Monochrome or color?

I guess that all photographers have been staring at the screen and wondering this more then ones in their career. As I almost exclusively shoot landscape photography I've fond my self wondering more then ones which is best monochrome or color. 

You are taught that contrasty photos are best suited for black and white, but sometimes I think that you don't need a picture containing mega contrast to make a nice monochrome picture. Like the one beneath you have contrast in some areas and some flat areas. Sometimes it's very hard to decide on which way to go. In the end I went with the color one because I just love the orange/yellow shine from the rising sun behind the farm.

On one hand I'm often going for the colorful sunset, autumn leafs, blue water etc, on the other hand I think that a monochrome perhaps have a longer life-span if you make a print, hanging it on a wall.

As always the photo is available in better rez on my web page larssonsphoto.com since I went for the color one that's the one on my page. But please tell me in the comment field what you think, monochrome ore color?

Wish you all a great week

/Fredrik

Abundance

As a guy who loves landscape photography this is the time of abundance here in Sweden. The autumn colors is magnificent, where ever you look you see a potential photo. It's like letting the Cookie monster in on a donut factory, he would go loco and scream COOKIE.

So how to address this problem?

I don't have the answer, but I guess the best thing to do is go back to basic with the composition, looking for leading lines, points of interests etc. But it isn't easy when mother earth show of her best side (in my opinion).

With that said here comes a shoot from yesterday just a ten minutes drive from were I live. It's a 3 exp HDR. For this and more autumn shots in full rez check out my site Fredrik Larsson Photography which I have updated with some pics from yesterday.

Have a great week.
Fredrik

Workflow HDR

From the top, just love the +Nik Photography  collection. I've fumble a bit with it past month but the other day I bought the collection, about 100€, and I couldn't be happier.
I'm now going to take you though my workflow using Nik and Lightroom.

I was out the other evening scouting locations for capturing the autumn foliage colors when I came upon this abandoned quarry about one hour drive from were I live.

This is the normal exposure, taken from a set of 3. -2, normal and +2.

I took the three exposures though HDR Efex Pro 2, were I used the preset "Graduated" and did some tweaks to it. and this is the result after a touch of Lightroom (spot-removal, crop, lens-correction)

This is were I usually was content and I think it is a good image. But little did I know what Viveza, Color Efex and Sharpener did to the picture.
I used Viveza 2 to umpf up the rocks and some sky tweaking
Color Efex pro 4 for creating more feeling of warmth to the photo.
Last I threw it through Sharpener Pro 3.0, and got this result

And if I may say so, this picture is great :-)
For full resolution please check it out at my portfolio.

By the way, I'm not sponsored by Nik or anything.

I wish you all a great weekend
/Fredrik