More Than a Month of Monochrome

As a cre­ative chal­lenge, and because I LOVE black and white, I have decided to shoot/process all of my per­sonal work for the rest of May and the whole month of June in mono­chrome. Maybe partly due to the announce­ment of the Leica M Mono­chrom (code­name Henri–yes, that Henri) and partly because a short audit of my favorite pho­tos found many of them to be black and white, I feel the need to explore tones, tex­tures, con­trast, and mood more extensively.

I will be shoot­ing pri­mar­ily in RAW for max­i­mum pro­cess­ing flex­i­bil­ity, and I’m sure I’ll be call­ing upon the most excel­lent Nik Sil­ver Efex Pro for help in con­ver­sions. I still have a roll of Tri-X loaded in my Nikon FM2, also, so I might fin­ish that up and load up another.

My great hope is that I will pro­duce some com­pelling images, and that I will learn more about “see­ing” in black and white–something that I think has already been one of my strengths. There is some­thing time­less and con­tem­pla­tive about black and white that draws me in and holds my atten­tion. I am in no way sug­gest­ing that work­ing in color is infe­rior or less seri­ous (William Eggle­ston has already dis­proven that!). I am sug­gest­ing that I per­son­ally find black and white images com­pelling when well done, and that I feel like in this dig­i­tal age when we can shoot in color and con­vert to black and white after the fact, that we have lost some of the expe­ri­ence of being lim­ited to shades of gray.

Call it what you will, I am look­ing for­ward to the chal­lenge and to the images. I invite any­one that fol­lows this blog to tag along, and to share with me their own black and white images.

And no, I won’t be pick­ing up an $8,000 man­ual focus, black and white only cam­era any­time soon. ;-)