For the love of Black and White

 

Ah, those days of working in the darkroom for hours on end,  printing black and white photos.  So zen-like.  So creative. So rewarding. So time consuming. So wasteful.  So toxic. Yup, it was all of that,  but of course there was no alternative.  Today there isn’t much alternative either, at least not for me.  I’ve been shooting digital for more than a decade, and the results have been great although I must say, my favorite photo is one I made in the darkroom on silver gelatin paper; this black and white print, made with Tri-X film, taken on the streets of downtown Brooklyn in 1977, hangs on my wall to this day:

Over the past few years I’ve admired the work of some photographers shooting digital and processing them in black and white.  Their blacks were so smooth and beautiful, the whites clean, with wonderful gradations of grey throughout.  I envied them, but was having so much fun with color, that black and white took a back seat.  Sometimes I did need to convert a color image to black and white for a client and my efforts were satisfactory, but still, they didn’t stand up to the standard that I’d been seeing in magazines and online.  So recently I purchased Nik's Efex Pro 2 software (before Google bought them) and now I am much more excited about my b&w images.  Using this software is pretty easy, and it allows you to tweak every part of the image, as well as make global changes.  Here are just some of my recent photos of color images converted to black and white, using this software.  These were taken in  Joshua Tree National Park and the Yucatan, Mexico, respectively.