Mormon Rocks, Inland Empire, CA

Hello and happy labour day weekend. I am really new to photography and recently purchased a Canon EOS T3i. I took these 2 shots yesterday at Mormon Rocks in Southern California. I'm hoping to learn as much as I can from your advice and opinions.

This shot was taken with the my 18-55mm lens at 18mm, 1/125s, f/11, ISO 100.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/photogserg/7908​779988/

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/photogserg/7908​782068/

Nice! Always passed by but never stopped by!

Should you decide to learn the art of photography, you might start by not taking pictures at high noon...wait until the golden hours, and, setting your picture style to monochrome is an unacceptable way to obtain B&W images.
Learn to shoot RAW and use your supplied software to post process your images.

Thank you for your advice, I have my camera setup to take both raw and jpg so lucky I still have the shot in raw. I used picasa 3 to change the raw image into B&W, here is the photo taken from the raw file.

HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/gif' | Redirected to error image by FLICKR

I think what chauncey was saying is that you should work from color to produce your b&w afterwards.
You have a lot more control of light & texture that way.
Do you have a RAW color file?

Bump up the F stops to 9 or 11 or a bit higher to get better depth capture. Very flat image.

Keep taking photos, you've got great locations. Some night shots with light trails on that road would look amazing

Qbx,
Yes I do have the color Raw.

Carlh,
Thats a great idea, the location is only 15 mins away from me so I will try both your suggestions.

Ok so I did a bit of post production on the color version I had and came up with this

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/photogserg/7934​746692/

Zowie - that's some serious color. Now try working that into a B&W by varying the saturation of the individual color channels to get something that will look more dynamic. Here is a take on it. It developed some banding in the sky because of the small jpg but on your original you should not get that.

Ok, I'll try that out on the raw file and post it here.

Thanks again for the advice!