In the distant past I spend many hours in a black-and-white darkroom making prints. When I was finally able to afford color film I got into shooting slides and had relatively few prints made. I just didn’t care for the quality of even relatively high quality prints. Then I learned that I could scan my slides and make my own prints after optimizing the image in Photoshop. Suddenly I was happy with color prints from my slides. And then came digital cameras.
Shooting color with a digital camera is a fantastic way to do B&W. One can use the color data of the image to control the tones in the B&W image. This is key — amazing control without the need for the old B&W filters. Still, I love color and have converted very few of my images to B&W.
A recent talk I attended inspired me to do some B&W conversions. Here are a dozen I produced during my first semi-serious return to B&W in many years. Arizona, Utah, and Wisconsin are represented with one image each. There are two from Bhutan. The rest are from NH and VT.
