Model - film noir | monomad | my dose of b&w

I hate to start this post on low note, but - it is Sunday afternoon and with that the weekend is almost over. While, on a personal note, I'm quite bummed about that, at least I had a weekend to enjoy some leisure time.

Fortunately or unfortunately just in time for the weekend the warm spring weather turned around and it got quite cold again. So instead of venturing outside I spent (and keep spending) the whole weekend inside. We were actually contemplating lighting the fireplace one more time before closing its doors for the summer. Who knows, maybe we'll have a fire later tonight.

So what did I actually do all weekend? Well, yesterday I spent a good deal of my day checking out Axies and CryptoKitties, and decided to get myself a cat or two. I somewhat regret it, because the gas fees that I had to pay made the kittie 3x as expensive as the sales price. Oh well, I love cats, but cannot have any IRL, so I am not too upset.

And then I continued my journey to learn and get more experience playing Splinterlands. I never thought that I would like a digital card game, but it is really fun and I'm looking forward to playing some more real soon. Later in the day we played World of Warships together with a friend back in Germany. I love the fact that you can be thousands of miles away, but play together and talk and see each other while gaming. We used Discord for it, but there are many other options.

And that was Saturday, pretty much a computer and gaming day. Those kind of days happen pretty frequently in this household. Oh, I almost forgot, I did get moving at some point during the gaming sessions and had a nice work-out.

This morning after breakfast I started looking through my Lightroom catalogue to get inspiration and decide which photos to share with you today. I settled on a few photos from a model shoot I did a while back. Please meet Alexandria, an artist and professional model from NJ (link below), you will like photos of her again, because I did a few shoots with her. She is a real pro and a pleasure to work with.

These photos here are actually really pretty in color with the warm yellow, lights blurring into the beautiful background bokeh. I was curious to see if these would work in black and white, so I tentatively converted one of the photos, the 2nd one, to monochrome, adjusted a few settings and - wow! - it actually works really beautifully. I decided to develop them in the style of film noir with bright whites and highlights and dark shadows.

The temptation was high to make one of the full-body portraits into the colorkey image, accentuating her fancy shoes 😃. Maybe I'll do that for another post.

I hope you'll enjoy! And have a great rest of the weekend!