Welcome to spring in the southland - the result of an overnight snow on Easter. That's what happens when Easter falls almost as early as possible (first Sunday following the first full moon of spring - who came up with that?). Bookends - to match today's last snow of the season(we hope) PAD, here's the PAD for this season's first snow http://www.pbase.com/ed_k/image/86363806 - almost 6 months from 1st to last which is way too much winter weather.
Not much color here along the Old Rag fire road in Shenandoah National Park so I decided to go for pure B&W. The B&W conversion options in Nik's Color Efex Pro 3 (3 main conversions with 3 sub-options for one of the 3 main) are powerful - and so much easier and effective than mucking around with channels and the like.
Shot with a circular polarizer to maximize the cloud contrast and a grad ND filter to help with the tonal imbalance between the light sky and the dark road (and a Tripod - naturally). It's hard to screw this up with the D300 and the proper accessories like the aforementioned two filters. There's no rush so there's no need to bracket via the camera's bracket feature. Check it out via the monitor and histograms (I love having all 3 color channels as well as luminosity finally); no excuse to miss on exposure. None! Also used the center weighted metering mode (in the brighter sky area) and a -1 EV. I did not want to lose the sky even as little as is showing and preferred shooting & processing the result on the darker side because that's the kind of day it was just then. A lot of sky detail was lost in converting this to a low-res web display but the 12MP version is great.