This is my entry for the #monomad challenge.
Its been ages since I've said that!
But yes, this is a long overdue post to the Black and White (monomad) community
My partner has come home from University for Christmas, and has another couple of weeks before she heads back to resume her studies. As part of her Wildlife Media course though, she has some projects to be getting on with, and that meant she needed to head out to the local nature reserve at Whisby to get some images.
And as it was a Saturday, I had a day off, and decided to pop along too!
Whisby is only a few miles down the road, and we've visited it regularly (regular readers will know I even ran down here a couple of weeks ago.
Its been awhile since I've used a proper DSLR camera, and today was an opportunity to dust mine off and give it a rare outing!
It is fair to say that I've been feeling a little uninspired with photography recently...
As part of her Wildlife Media course, the university has given all the students a film camera each over the Christmas break in order to practice and get some images for their projects. The film in that camera was a black and white one, and so I was inspired to shoot in just Black and White myself
I did shoot heses all in RAW by the way, which means that even though I was using a 'monochrome' filter on it, each image file retains the full colours available. Once I import them into lightroom, I am then able to edit them back to black and white, and as they are are RAW files I have plenty of options available to edit as much as I need
It was a dull grey day, so it was hard work to find interest shots, but I'm reasonably happy with my selection here... the above features a Cormorant holding out its wings so they can dry out (the species swims underwater to find food)
This little Robbin was super tame, and he sat patiently on his perch as I moved closer and closer to him, I think in this shot I was literally within arms reach of him
A lot of the black and white images I have created in the past are usually colour images, which I've then chosen to edit as a monochome image, almost as an afterthought.
As a much needed change of pace, these were all shot in black and white, and it was an interesting exercise in itself, to see what worked and what didn't.
There was a lot of trial and error involved... I kept taking what I though were interesting shots, only to discover that when that shot was captured in black and white, it was bland and boring.
Eventually though after playing around and tryin to find different angles, I think I managed to get some images worth sharing... well I hope so at least!
I do think there is a LOT of room for improvement, so I think I'm try this again soon... go out for a stroll with my camera set to 'black and white' and have another play...
What do you think? Which images do you like? Which don't work as well?
Thank you for reading, I hope you found it interesting.
If you have any thoughts or opinions on this article then I'd love to see your comments.
And if you really like the content then maybe you would like to upvote or re-hive it.
All Photos taken by 
Check out my website for more of my work.
