Week 1 Black and White 365 Challenge

Day 1 Light Fitting

Welcome to a brand new 365 challenge!

This year I've decided to go more in depth in black and white photography. It's something I've been thinking about doing for a while now as I think it helps you to pay more attention to the light, textures and composition of an image instead of being distracted by the colors. I find today's world can be rather overwhelming with all the gaudy colors on buildings, toys, billboards, cars, even houses all clashing for attention. It's nice to be able to simplify a scene down to it's composition, it's light, patterns and textures too.

I've also decided to embrace the dark side of photography to try to loosen up and shoot more emotionally instead of the more rigid by the book, follow all the rules type shooting I've been finding myself doing recently. By the dark side I mean allowing loads of noise and grain in my images by shooting at extremely high ISOs, by shooting in very low light, by underexposing my images and any other way I can think of to add a bit of grain to my images. I'm also embracing the flaws that I've been taught not to shoot such as, purposely tilting my horizons instead of keeping them level, allowing images that are blurred or a bit out of focus if it creates more feeling or mystery in an image. I've also boosted the contrast in camera and I'm not sharpening my images.

In other words I'm having a year of breaking the rules I've been taught in the past.

I think this year is going to be a lot of fun and a very good learning exercise. For example I've never really shot in black and white before so I've never had to process these types of images. I'd heard of dodging and burning but had never tried it before and so on day five's image I had to search help in photoshop to find out what the tools looked like and where to find them. I'm quite pleased with the resulting image.

Day 2 Feathers

Day 3 Glass Jar

Day 4 Shadows through a leaf

Day 5 My gorgeous daughter and my first attempt with the burn tool

Day 6 A White moth 

Day 7 Early morning drive to work

I hope you'll join me on this learning adventure and maybe even try it for yourself. I think having a project of some kind helps you grow as a photographer and it's certainly a lot of fun. It's also good to have a project to focus on when you don't feel like picking up your camera, it helps to reinvigorate you. Good luck!

Have a great week :)