Sometimes it's Black & White

In college I took a required Black & White photography class.  I thought I was going to hate it because I'd already taken one in high school, so I knew my way around a camera & a darkroom.  The first year I changed my major to art, I took this class.  I know I've said this before but I wouldn't trade my decision to study art for anything.  I learned so much more in the first two years of this major than I did in the first two years of college.  Art combines history, technique, & language to give you an education that I believe allows you to approach problems uniquely & interact with people better.  You're constantly asked to critique art from people you know & art from people you've never met, in a constructive & concise way.  You learn how a visual language is used to tell a story.  You learn how this language evolves through time & changes through continents.

I loved my black & white photography class and photography continues to be fascinating to me.  I think I am very lucky to have a father & brother-from-another-mother as talented in photography as they are. I'm no good at seeing things through a lens like they are.  I only capture awesome photos by chance.  But I try to think about the pictures I take, make them well composed, etc & I try to take pictures everyday.  The most helpful, though not the best, is my iPhone.  I don't care how you feel about iPhone photography what I do care is that this sort of expression is available to the masses.  Many will poorly compose a picture of their breakfast on instagram but many more will learn about photography, lighting, composition & grow.  They begin to problem solve creatively & visually.....that makes me happy.

I went through some of my daily photos & used Snapseed edits to make them black & white.  Some of them worked quite well, some of them.....not so much.  As I was playing around with these photos I tried to remember that they should be well exposed & have a range of pure white to dark black & everything in between.

Sometimes it's fun to do something different to your photos.  You can gain a new look on your life, see more detail in black & white, and figure out the most important part of the image.  With out color, you're learning about composition & exposure....you're not focusing on how pretty it is.

So here's a peak into the black & white of my life over the last few months.  My favorite photos are the little bird in the grass & all the photos in the first set there!

Do you look at your life in black & white?

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