Composing myself for a Challenge

This month Cee’s Compose Yourself Challenge is about black and white photography. This is an area that I don’t wander into much. I bought my first roll of colour film in the early 1970s and after that had little use for black and white. I do appreciate the dramatic quality of some black and white photographs more now that I am older but generally I want to portray the world in living colour. I do sometimes use black and white to create a more retro look or if I feel that the colours in a photo don’t work I’ll try black and white before I dump it. Sometimes it works out better.

I have not really used RAW before either and after consulting my camera manual to find the RAW button went out to take some pictures in the garden. Sadly it appears I did something wrong. I guess you have to press the button before every shot, I ended up with jpegs after all and changed them to black and white with Picasa which is my preferred editing software.

I set out to take more abstract pictures than usual looking for texture and detail. It was a bright sunny day so not ideal for what I wanted to do.

My original photo

after editing.

I have cropped  and straightened some photos and either used the Black and White feature or filtered black and white. For the next one I used a feature called Holga-ish which I thought was more interesting. It not only turns the photo black and white but gives the effect of being taken with one of those old plastic cameras.

My original photo

After editing.

The original

The edited photo.

The original

The edited photo

Conclusion

I do think that using black and white seems appropriate for an old, slightly scruffy house like mine. The sky certainly looks better. I love to see a bright blue sky but in this case maybe it is a bit distracting because there is so much of it. On the other hand I did prefer the colour version of the one with the bench as I liked the bright reflection in the window surrounded by neutral colours. I am not sure if I quite “get” digital black and white photography yet so I’m glad we are continuing with this subject next month.