Silver September - The "How Is It For You?" thread ...

I haven't graduated to RAW. I'm shooting color and converting for two reasons. First, I only found out that digital cameras HAD a B&W mode last week! 2nd, I've got a choice of filters to use so I can choose the one that seems right for the image, and I've pushed enough sliders around at random I'm going to do some tutorials and learn what's really going on here. And 3rd (who said I could count?) if an image bombs in B&W, I've still got something for my "archives."
 
This challenge arrived at a curious time for me. I had been using my newly-acquired Takumar 200/5.6 for 2 weeks or so, and that lens' lovely bokeh and rendering were leading me to new photographic places, philosophically speaking. Rather than looking at subjects as, well, "subjects", I had just begun to look at subjects as a conduit to examining colors, shapes, textures and light/shadow interplay in the natural world... then Luke's "Silver September" is dropped on the doorstep, and that provided further impetus to explore the latter trio of attributes. I haven't had as much time to go rambling as I would like, but I'm trying.
 
I can understand why people initially like colour better. We're so used to colours nowadays. I guess you have to learn to appreciate B/W photos in the colour era. E.g. I noticed that people near me usually started by saying they like colour better but the more they saw B/W photos, the more they appreciated B/W and started to see things they would not have noticed otherwise. Frankly, it happened to me as well.

Its beautiful, Paul. Some people just don't get black and white, especially those who never really paid much attention during film days... there really werent that many of us with cameras.
 
I've been meaning to practice B&W more lately, so this project came at the right time in one sense. But I still don't have as many opportunities to get outside and shoot consistently. However I probably took a few hundred photos last weekend up in Door County so I should have some to post in the second half of the month. Regardless of how much I'm posting, it's inspiring/educational to see what everyone else is coming up with this month.
 
Up to the mid 60's everything I used was BW. (as were newspapers & tv) Colour came in for me on slides only & the early colour photo prints were pretty dire for colour accuracy & were a lot more expensive. (now we look back with nostalgia but at the time I thought these truly horrible).

Later on I had very thin BW from the cameras I used & the meters seemed to be biased to colour.
 
I grew up in the Soviet Union where color photography was basically unavailable. We had some pretty dreadful color films from Czechoslovakia and East Germany but paper and chemicals were prohibitively expensive. All our family photos up to early 90s were strictly black&white. Color became widespread only with the advent of market economy, when "Kodak Express" booths started popping up faster than mushrooms after the rain.
 
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