Monochrome

A while back, I tried something fun on my Instagram. I posted only black and white photos for a month, and since I upload two photos a day there, it added up to a total of 60 photos. It was easy in the beginning, since I had some black and white photos which I'd been wanting to upload. However, after a few days, it got tougher and tougher. I was running low on black and white photos, and I didn't have much time to take new photos (only some iPhone shots here and there). Hence, I decided to take some of my old photos that I hadn't seen for a long time and reprocessed them as black and white. All I can say is that the results were awesome. Sure, there were a few photos that didn't work out in black and white, but most of the photos went well with it. Just by reprocessing these photos into monochrome taught me a lot more about black and white. My eye for black and white definitely got better in the process, being able to tell whether a photo would look good in monochrome and all. I learned the importance of shadows and highlights as well. In colour photos, shadows and highlights are usually not as important unless you're taking photos of light. But in black and white, they are very important, if you're not careful, you'll lose a lot of details because they all seem to blend in together.

Taking and processing photos in black and white only made me realize how distracting colours can be. Monochrome photos remove all of that distractions, allowing me to focus only on the subject, the emotions, and other details I never would have noticed in my colour photos. It was an amazing feeling for sure. Another thing is that I learnt to keep the details in my photographs as minimal as possible after this period. I guess it's because I realized that a lot of the details in the photos tend to turn out just black after being converted to black and white. Being more minimal with my photos also mean that they're less distracting now as well. I can say for sure that I now know how to better process my photos in terms of black and white.

However, I've since missed colour photos. And since we're living in the 21st century, I should embrace colour photos as much as I love black and white photos. So while my eye for black and white has sharpened, I would like to focus more on colour photos now. But for now, enjoy some of my black and white photos.