.jpg "Beach Houses")
In today’s world of digital, pushing colors, HDR, over processing people tend to forget that sometimes things are just better in Black and White. I took the two shots in this post on a shoot with my good friends John, Brad and Vasant as we got up at 4am to photograph the sunrise on Plum Island up in Newburyport. Both were captured after sunrise when the sun was fully above the horizon, and both looked perfectly fine in color. But that is just it, they looked fine, meaning they were just okay. They didn’t scream to me as winners.
.jpg "Surf Fishing")
The thing is though, when I took these photos I was seeing them in black and white in my mind. I was fortunate to grow up on Cape Cod and the scenes in these two photos are all to common down there, you almost take them for granted. I have also looked at tons of old black and white photos of these very same types of settings while growing up and when I stood on these beaches this past August, my mind immediately was transported to those images in the past and it was an instant and simple click of the shutter. No tripods, no long exposure, no HDR, just a click and I knew I had what I wanted. Import into Lightroom, a quick black and white conversion and a few tweaks of the sliders and boom, I had the images that were in my mind. My good friend Rich Beaubien has been doing a ‘Year in Monochrome‘ project on flickr where he posts a new black and white photo everyday for a year, check it out. It has been a great project to watch, and he is one of the people that has been getting me to think simpler and in black and white, all kinds of good stuff like that. The world is overly complicated as it is, there is not reason we need to make our photography as well.
