Black & White Special Issue Assignment Winner Edward Mendes

Congratulations to Edward Mendes for his winning photo in the Black & White Special Issue Assignment. This photo was also selected as the Photo Of The Day on May 2nd.

"McWay Falls has become one of my favorite places along the Big Sur coast to photograph since I originally visited it 8 or 9 years ago.  I continue coming back in the hopes of finding that perfect moment when all the conditions fall into place. On this particular evening the light came and went but I continued shooting the scene until it was almost completely dark, as I liked the beautiful blue hues the soft twilight light was providing.

"I’ve had a pre-visualized image of McWay Falls in my mind for a number of years, however, I’d yet to achieve it.  I actually worked on this image off-and-on for almost two years, processing and re-processing the file, as I knew there was a great photograph there if I could just find it. The problem was I was trying to force it to work as a color image. Eventually, I came to the realization that the image was meant to be a black and white and so I reprocessed the file yet again but this time the image I knew I had finally showed itself.

"The image was captured using a Mamiya M645 on Fuji Velvia film before being scanned and processed in Adobe Camera Raw.  All tonal work, dodging/burning etc. was done in Photoshop CS5 and the image was converted into black and white using Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 however nothing overly special was done during processing."

For every Assignment, the OP editors will select a winning image at the conclusion o the entry period. The winner will be featured on the OP home page and in a blog article about how the photograph was taken. To get your photos into the running all you have to do is submit them.