I was at a local sunflower farm on a late summer evening and the ominous clouds rolling it just struck me. This looked even more oppressive in black and white. The sunflower rows were narrow and tall, and and created almost the feeling of being in a labyrinth in places.
General feedback - noise/grain, tonality, moodiness.
Fuji X-T3, f/16, 1/60s, ISO 5000, 16mm
Hi @debbie_campbell, You have shared with us a powerful moment of weather. It turns a field of sunflowers into something more… An approaching summer storm with the row of trees echoing Cathedral Rocks in “Clearing Winter Storm” by Ansel Adams perhaps?
The B&W conversion is working very effectively for you, but as you suggest the noise is quite distracting especially in the sky/clouds when viewed full size, some noise reduction would help things a lot… Really well seen, easily fixed to take it the extra way.
@guy I tried removing the noise, but this image is old (2021) and not very good quality, I discovered. That’s probably why I added grain in the first place 
The new AI based noise reduction tool in Lightroom (also standalone utilities) are doing really wonderful recovery of even old files. Might be worth seeing what they can do to help you recover this.
Topaz and DXO were not successful cleaning up the noise. There are odd areas in the photos and I should have looked at that more carefully before posting here, it was taken before I started getting serious about photography.
Early or not (noisy or not) you were seeing extremely well.
Thank you @guy!
Debbie, the drama is palpable here. Your b&w conversion looks good. I especially like how the sunflowers on the left glow…too bad those on the right didn’t show up as well, but then they’d be pointing in the opposite direction to the ones on the left, which is not how sunflowers behave. The noise is almost certainly due to your high iso setting. There are no 35mm cameras that won’t show significant noise when their iso goes above 1600 (or less).
@Mark_Seaver Yes, the X-T3 is old and was not good with noise. Thank you for the comments!
