Recently, we took a trip down to Florida to visit my family. My brother has a small mustang horse ranch and it’s always fun to let the kids ride and see how much Don Diego De La Vega, the newest addition to the herd, has grown since the last time we were there.
As always, we headed out loaded down with the “essentials”, the kids, the dog and of course, the camera in tow.
As a photographer, I always try to view my day as an opportunity to capture a moment… and this was gonna be great! On this trip I decided to do something different than I normally do – go black and white.
Generally I will take color photos, then decide later to turn them black and white but this time I changed the setting in my camera and didn’t look back. It was great fun. It made me think differently about lighting, composition, feeling and overall artistic expression.
There is something about black and white that compels the viewer to fill in the blanks with whatever color they think should be there. Funny thing though, I started thinking of the colorful world in monochrome before I ever pressed the shutter button.
I believe it paid off. I learned some things, as I always try to do, and had great fun as well. Maybe next time I will limit myself to one of my manual vintage Russian lenses and see what happens.