B&W's

This post is to showcase my attempts at experimenting with the B&W setting on my D80. The stills were taken the day before I had taken experimental lighting shots at my friends house, it just took me a while to get to upload them on my laptop, process which ones I wanted and which ones I could do without. The only editing I did was to crop the images --I would have liked to do more, but the editing software I have has only a limited number of editing options available. The setting for these pictures was a dyke(?)/waterway across from my house that extends a considerable distance and was dried out at the time (this was the day right before the thunderstorm we had last week in Toronto).
Like most of my pictures, the impetus for these was simply an impulse.
There are really no themes for the pictures I take, not because I detest direction in my photographs, but because I am not nearly as skilled and perceptive enough as more experienced photographers to be able to capture a naturally occurring narrative for a particular scene.
Many of the photos I posted are watered down selections of objects or scenes I took multiple pictures of in various exposure settings and shutter speeds. What I came to realize only after this experience was that B&W photography is quite complicated in it's simplicity and best to capture moments of profound meaning, suffering, or tranquility with somber colors of grays and blacks that do nothing to detract from the raw emotion in an image. I found this to be the preferred method of shooting by one of Europe's most famous photojournalists; Erik Refner. The video of his shoot in Marrakesh showed him to favor the use of primes for portraits (you're probably thinking, "no shit?!") but he only used B&W and sometimes even macros to get up really close to his subjects. Mind you, he had a habit of picking very weathered and worn faces --thereby increasing the conveyance of perceived character. Nonetheless, his images of simple weathered faces had more depth than any color portrait ever has (that I've seen at least). To see his work just google him and you'll find his website.


All pictures are property of Habib Ahmadzai and of Prime Photography and cannot be redistributed or used without authorization by owners of the images contained on this webpage Copyright © 2007.