The Painted Desert Inn and a Conundrum

Over time, a lot of my images have been gravitating towards a black and white presentation. I have some thoughts on how and when to use color, but as often as not I tend towards the black and white. One of the subjects on the trip to the southwest has presented me with a dilemma, I processed a handful of the images…and I like both. Equally well even.

One of the days on the trip we drove west from Gallup, one of our base camps, heading towards Petrified Forest National Park. I will cover the entire park in a later post, though to a large extent I view the park as two separate but conjoined parks. The initial, southern part of the Park containing the Petrified forest and badlands and then the northern part of the park, acquired later in the thirties, known as the Painted Desert.

The prominent man made destination in the Painted Desert portion of the park is the Painted Desert Inn. On the list of National Historic places, the Inn is designed in the Pueblo Revival style from the mid 1930’s. Small by national park inn standards (only 8 guest rooms while it still lodged visitors) it is designed to blend into the surroundings and is beautifully placed on the edge of plateau overlooking the desert.

Both times I have been to the park I reached the Inn at the end of the day. The first trip 8 years ago found the skies cloudy by the time I arrived. Whereas this time, upon my arrival, the clouds finally broke and a beautiful light and sky saved what otherwise was a mediocre day. I started capturing the Inn with the Petri, using Delta 100. I have the film processed and will work on the images eventually. Once the roll of film was spent, I captured a few digital images on the Pen F as well.

As I processed the digital images, I found myself in a conundrum. Even though I shot the images with the intent of going black and white, the raw files in Lightroom spoke of beautiful color as well. What to do? The headline image, the abstract of the exposed timbers, is best in black and white but the other images I processed? Never really came to a conclusion. SO I did both. Which do you like? Do they change your thoughts on how to use color and when to go black and white. I suspect I will be thinking for a while…