As many of you know, black and white is my first love in photography. For this reason, BLACK & WHITE is my favorite theme for THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE. It isn’t a Sophie’s Choice situation for me. They tell me to pick one. I pick BLACK & WHITE and don’t look back. Good luck WATER. Hope you make it LEADING LINES. Better luck next life STILL LIFE.
I literally take hundreds of pictures for this theme. I usually effort to take at least a few pictures every day. On BLACK & WHITE week that number balloons. But I only submit 1 picture for THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE. But the others don’t sit in a bin collecting dust. I will be sharing those losers over the next… probably 3 weeks.
Don’t panic. Flower Thursday will still happen. The Ireland posts will still happen on Fridays. Sundays will still be about Tenderloining. The Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday posts will be beautiful, glorious black and white though!
I went about my black and white photography this year a little bit different than I normally do. In the past I’ve used it as an excuse to crack out the A72 and set it to high contrast monochrome and go to town. Which I still love to do. But the problem with doing that is that the images are:
- Recorded in .jpg.
- Black and White for eternity.
That normally is fantastic. After all, nothing fuels creativity better than limitations. However, I knew that there were 3 particular events that week that I would be attending that I needed to get some color images. Lugging around 2 cameras and then taking at times identical images with 2 different cameras was going to be a tremendous pain and not realistic.
I made a command decision. I decided to shoot all the images with the A7RV. In color. Then I batch converted them all with a Photoshop preset called B&W Punch. It is one of the oldest Photoshop presets. It darkens blues and cyans. Boosts reds and yellows. It also boosts clarity and texture. Finally it deepens the shadows and pulls up highlights. Does it work for all pictures? Oh definitely not! That is part of the fun!
Here are the pictures I took after 12:01 PM on Day 1 of BLACK & WHITE Week:
That is it for Day 1. Tomorrow I’ll share the Day 2 images!