I haven’t been out with the camera yet this year and was starting to feel the call, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to shoot.

The other night I was checking out 500px.com (a really good site to visit if you are looking for photography inspiration) and I found a street photographer (Marco Larousse) that shot pretty much exclusively in black and white.  His images are amazing and there’s something very special about the black and white look he’s perfected (you can see for yourself here).

Now I have nothing against black and white, but usually shoot and process my images in color.  Sure I’ll process the odd image when I get home in black and white but I don’t think I’ve ever gone out with the express desire to just capture just black and white images.  Until that is today.

So this was my goal, go out for an hour and just shoot in black and white.  I wanted to keep this light and easy so I just grabbed my X100T which is a camera with a fixed lens, so no zooming.  What’s nice about the fuji gear is that you can set a film simulation mode and shoot all your images in that mode.  So I set it up to just shoot black and white and headed out.

I should say here that I’m no a street photographer.  A good street photog can capture real emotion in passers by, usually without them interacting with the camera, trust me it’s a real skill.  You can look at some of the good images and really understand the feeling or emotion of the subject – it’s amazing.  Also it requires you to be a little sneaky and shoot people without them knowing – and I have a bit of a problem with this.  I have no issue going up to someone and asking can I shoot you, but I feel embarrassed shooting people and then getting caught, silly I know but that’s me.

So I figured I’d just go out and take some black and white shots and see how they came out.  As Lisa and Abi wanted to go to Kirkland, I went along too and went off on my own for an hour while they did their own thing.  I took around 100 shots and after processing them when I got home, picked 16 I kind’a liked.  These aren’t great but it was fun setting myself a challenge so I thought I’d share

There are some of the town center and some of the harbor, there’s even a silly one of me taking a “sort-of” self portrait through a reflection in a Starbucks window.

I did enjoy doing this though so I’ll definately try this again, I’d love to try and capture some good street pictures so maybe I’ll work on that, and for some reason they do work well in black and white.

One image I took below that was interesting (6th one down), was where I found the place where Kirkland had temporarily stored the big Christmas wreaths the’ve just taken down.  When Lisa saw the picture she said “Oh – that’s so sad”.  I showed her a version of the same image in color and it didn’t have the same effect – and we decided it was MUCH better in black and white.  So there is something you get from black and white that color just doesn’t provide.