Monochromatics

Just a quick blog update from me today.

As my friends know, yesterday was my 29th birthday, and I had an awesome day of reflecting on my twenties and planning my goals for the next decade!  Angie surprised me with some gourmet cakes from our favourite little patisserie, and we joined my beautiful mother Jackie & Bill for some chow at another favourite local Japanese restaurant.

I would also like to thank everybody that rang, emailed, sms’d, facebooked, tweeted, and flickred me birthday wishes – thank you so much. I even had the pleasure of receiving two international phone calls – one from India (wow!) and another from my good good friend of 23 odd years, Matty B – who’s currently traveling around New Zealand having an awesome adventure. Thank you so much everyone!

So, the title of today’s blog is monochromatics as this week, I’ve been tweaking a lot of black and white images in Lightroom& Photoshop, and I’m really enjoying creating film-like effects with my digital images.

Monochromatic photography reminds me of how much I dig old school b&w film, printing for endless hours in the darkroom, mixing chemicals, fixers, stop baths, developing films in slightly hallucinogenic conditions, experimenting with film grain and contrast, sensitometry tests, and trying to understand Ansell Adam’s black and white zone system.  Ah, the good old days.

Here’s some images with a variety of different monochromatic effects and adjustments. Leave a comment and let me know what you think!