All images by Jayanta Roy. Used with a Creative Commons License.
Jayanta Roy’s Himalayan Odyssey photo series surely reminds us that you don’t need the Golden Hour to create fantastic landscape photos. According to Jayanta, he developed the series over a year of travelling. Now just imagine that for a second: you’ve been travelling a whole lot and you’ve accumulated a load of images. What’s going to make you choose the final photos for your portfolio? Luckily, Jayanta did a fantastic job not only with shooting the photos, but also getting really inspiring black and white photos of the the mountain range.
When you look at the project, you get a sense of some interesting cinematic and classic landscape photography influences. Part of this can easily remind you of something Nolan might shoot if he decided to reshoot Batman Begins on black and white IMAX film, but at the same time some of the compositions will surely remind you of Ansel Adams’ work. When you look closer, you can see everything from grain which on an LCD screen or desktop display looks very film-like.
You can tell there was a lot of work put into creating some sort of HDR look though while still maintaining the black and white appeal of the images. There is a lot of detail in the midtones and balances out well with both the highlights and the blacks. But perhaps some of my favorite things about the images has to do with the composition and sense of balance that Jayanta tries to achieve with each of the landscape photos. It’s again almost like a story of a balance between light and dark and could even remind someone of scenes from Middle Earth.
Ultimately this all makes sense with Jayanta’s bigger goal with his landscape photography: which is to bring about more awareness to climate change.
Check out more of Jayanta’s work over on his Behance page. And if you want to get more black and white landscapes, I seriously recommend subscribing to the Phoblographer’s premium publication, La Noir Image. We did nothing but landscapes for a single month and the publication is only about black and white photography.
