Symbolizing the difficulty photographers have in getting their work into galleries and museums, this photographer walks alone on Ruby Beach in Olympic National Park, Washington.
While some commercial galleries are starting to feature color photography, museums that have photography at all are almost always in black and white.
In light of that, I set out to look for color pictures in my collection that looked good when converted to black and white. Remarkably, they were few and far between.
My background lies in travel photography, as featured in my show at the Lyceum last year. I am especially interested in architecture, gardens, and landscapes. I have been doing almost exclusively color photography since starting in black and white back in high school. I have used 35mm SLRs, digital SLRs, small digital cameras, and iPhones. Today’s iPhones are amazingly good.
I do not ordinarily set out to create “Art”, but sometimes I’m lucky. As I have said before, the secret to good photography is good taste - I try to feature only my best photos. I like bright colors, especially red and blues.
The translation from color to black and white is tricky, hence the sparsity of photos that converted well. Dark blue skies with puffy white clouds work great, high contrast photos work well, architecture works well, animals can work well, people are difficult :-)
In any case, the original photo has to be very good, something that can be very hard to pin down, but I like to think I know it when I see it. The same is true when converting photos to “paintings” with filters in photo processing software, something even less well accepted than photography in general. I may do a show of that some day.
So, as alluded to at the start, I embarked on this project to accept the challenge of producing “art photography”, that, who knows, may someday be in a museum :-)
Symbolizing the difficulty photographers have in getting their work into galleries and museums, this photographer walks alone on Ruby Beach in Olympic National Park, Washington.
While some commercial galleries are starting to feature color photography, museums that have photography at all are almost always in black and white.
In light of that, I set out to look for color pictures in my collection that looked good when converted to black and white. Remarkably, they were few and far between.
My background lies in travel photography, as featured in my show at the Lyceum last year. I am especially interested in architecture, gardens, and landscapes. I have been doing almost exclusively color photography since starting in black and white back in high school. I have used 35mm SLRs, digital SLRs, small digital cameras, and iPhones. Today’s iPhones are amazingly good.
I do not ordinarily set out to create “Art”, but sometimes I’m lucky. As I have said before, the secret to good photography is good taste - I try to feature only my best photos. I like bright colors, especially red and blues.
The translation from color to black and white is tricky, hence the sparsity of photos that converted well. Dark blue skies with puffy white clouds work great, high contrast photos work well, architecture works well, animals can work well, people are difficult :-)
In any case, the original photo has to be very good, something that can be very hard to pin down, but I like to think I know it when I see it. The same is true when converting photos to “paintings” with filters in photo processing software, something even less well accepted than photography in general. I may do a show of that some day.
So, as alluded to at the start, I embarked on this project to accept the challenge of producing “art photography”, that, who knows, may someday be in a museum :-)
Here are some of my best.
Enjoy!
Jim Thomas