I told you that BLACK & WHITE was my favorite theme and I wasn’t joking. I took a ton of BLACK & WHITE pictures for last week’s theme and every day (well almost every day) this week I’m going to share another collection of alternates. This first collection consists of the pictures that I took on Monday and Tuesday.

There is a rule in digital photography that you should never take pictures in black & white. You should take them in color and convert the images to black & white with editing software. The reason for this is because you can always take color away from a digital image, but you can’t add color back to it, if it was never there. (I mean, that is close enough to the truth. If you really wanted to you could make an attempt to add color to a black & white image, but it would probably come out looking like an outtake from THE INFENRAL CAULDRON.

Any Georges Méliès fans in the house? No? I’ll move on.

But I decided to ignore the rules and took all my pictures in “High Contrast Monochrome”. Cause you know how I feel about rules.

Rules are for fools.
Rules are for tools.
Rules are for ghouls.
Rules are for pools.

But rules for photography? Well, mostly they are guidelines that can and should be broken. From time to time.

I had big plans to get out there everyday and take plenty of beautiful, dare I say, tasty High Contrast Monochrome images. But right out of the bat, my Monday went south on me. There was a virtual mine collapse at the Computer Mine and I ended up working from 7 AM to nearly 11 PM. I only got a few pictures taken here and there while I was able to take a few breaks.

So most of the Monday images are just testing camera settings, playing with my old friend the fisheye and testing a point and shoot that I would need to use later in the week.

Here are the Monday images:

I swear that when I saw this image on the small screen I thought there was a reflection of Naima staring back at me from the lid of my grill. I mean it is an uncanny likeness.

This is actually “Rich Monochrome”. Basically a HDR black & white image. A setting, that has its uses, but I don’t love it.

My desk. Been thinking about building my own desk lately.

Test shot with the point & shoot

Tuesday I also wasn’t as active as I originally thought I might be. I actually got out of work on time, but I think Monday sucked my will to live out of me. I had a pretty lazy Tuesday. But I did get out of the house for a little bit to take Naima on a car ride and to take my neighbor’s cans to the can redemption center. I took a bit of street photography while I was out and about.

Here are Tuesday’s images:

Still so very, very, very, many black & white pictures to share with you guys!