In The Shadow of the Black Sun - Ansel Adams "Overexposure Solarization" process

I read an interesting article in the November, December 2012 issue of American Photo Magazine about how Ansel Adams created a famous image in 1939 using "Overexposure Solarization" which results in a black sun in a Black & White Photo. I created one myself by accident just a few moments ago with this image and it reminded me of the article I had just read...

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/alanmars/823339​3610/

Interesting article here which includes Ansel Adams Photo "The Black Sun".

Anyone interested in how I did this using Silver Efex Pro 2...

Basically, I brought the image into Photoshop. After I had it processed for color (which took a lot of contrast and clarity adjustments as well as vibrance increase and saturation decrease for this particular photo. Once I had the color photo where I wanted it, I wanted to make it a Black & White.

This is where I had my little "oops" moment.

For this image, in Silver Efex I used the settings for "Wet Rocks" (#23) and I saw that it looked really grainy even though the original image was shot at ISO 100.

I used the Agfa APX Pro 100 under "Film Types" and I moved the Grain per Pixel slider to 500 and the "Soft", "Hard" slider all the way to Soft and that created a Greyish looking odd shaped sun.

Perplexed, I played around a little bit more by using the Green Color Filter.

Then under Global Adjustments I moved the Highlights and Structures sliders all the way to the right (100%). Then I had to play around with the contrast and brightness sliders to tweak it a bit more and the above image is what I ended up with.

Looks like I'll have to try and get a shot with my wide angle again all the way out at 10mm in order to get a tiny sun like Ansel Adams got in his photo. That way it'll be a small dot rather than a dark BLOB like I ended up getting.

That is an interesting phenomenon.

The photo looks spectacular I think it would better if the sun wasn't black.

Here it is without the black sun. It's not as dark or contrasty as the other one because if I did that then the sun would become grey as I mentioned earlier.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/alanmars/823240​9999/

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/alanmars/823224​8177/

Very nice. but I do like it more with out the black sun.

Could you do a local adjustment to the sun leaving the rest of the photo more contrasty? May be take the B&W back in to photoshop and work on the sun.

I like the B&W better than the colour, but then I usually do.

Idlefrog wrote in post #15309361
I like the B&W better than the colour, but then I usually do.

Same here.

I'll work on your suggestion. Should be pretty easy to do.

The fact that I achieved the effect without even trying is what blew me away.

I like it without the black sun best, interesting technique

Here's the Black Sun picture with a fixed regular sun...

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/alanmars/823365​8216/