New York City - Black and White

Went to New York City this past Easter weekend to visit a friend and of course I wouldn't have missed this opportunity to capture some photos. I know there are millions of photos out there of New York so I didn't want to just take the usual ones that I am sure everyone comes back from there with. The problem is that I only really had two days to do it and on one of those days I was met with rain and wind. So what do you do? Make the best of it! I decided to shoot these all mostly in black and white on the camera so that I could focus more on the tonality and composition of the photos and less on the actual colors. Once I imported them into Lightroom of course they came back out as RAW color images. I chose to convert them into black and white in Lightroom plus crop some of them to 1x1. I think it gives them more of a timeless and nostalgic feel.

Black and White

Lately I have been experimenting more with black and white post processing and realized just how interesting it can be. Often I find that an image that doesn't work well in color suddenly takes on a whole new look when it is viewed in black and white. This seems to be especially true on shots that might have been under or overexposed or where the color temperature just doesn't seem to be right. Below are my results after post processing some shots I took a few weeks ago.

Photography Course Class #2

Tonight was the second class of the photography course I am taking. Each of the students brought in a small assortment of their own personal photographs and the instructor offered his thoughts on them as did some of the students. It was really interesting to see the creativity in some of the shots and fun way to learn about composition and what works and what doesn't. We concluded tonight's class with some shooting in black and white to understand exposure and how to shoot in full manual mode, AV mode and TV mode. Above are a few shots from the class of some lighted props and one of my instructor.