Black and White:

I am rather overwhelmed by how disruptive a move can be. It seems my wife and I have converted ourselves from horizontal living in Seattle to vertical living in Portland; suburbia to a urban walking lifestyle with shops, boulangerie, postoffice, grocery store and many nice restaurants within a block or two. Through the sale of our home and purchase of our town home, these and family events took me away from the maintenance of my web site as well as the posting of comments. Now that we are reasonable situated and have a comfortable working space not given to change, I should be able to settle back into some type of routine.During the approximately 9 months since I posted an entry; yes I cannot believe it has been that long; several events in have consumed my photographic interest. The first was a nice 10 day visit to Venice, Italy. Shortly, I put up some images from that trip. But of relevance to this blog post, my concentration with black and white images.In a many ways, thanks to all of the great images that exist out there and to a degree,  my newly found love of B&W is due to an increasing  use of the saturation slider on many of the images that one sees published. I will admit that I love lovely colors in sunsets and that historical greens of spring or the nice yellows and oranges of fall that Velvia film used to provide. However, the digital cameras of today have gotten so good that there is nothing wrong with the good natural color that these cameras can provide. But walk through the latest posts at Nature Photographers Online, 500px, or Earthshots.org to get a sample of photography today. Do not get me wrong, there are a lot of very good images on these sites, it is just that it is going in a direction I chose not to go. I love good composition and creative thinking, but in more of the traditional sense. Not spending a bunch of time taking 9 to 25 images of the same subject and then blending them together to produce another image that is almost indistinguishable from another.A new found web site that I like to visit and follow is Ming Thein. He has a lot of very interesting posts on black and white as well as on photography in general. Most recently, he had a couple of articles on "Shooting for yourself." To be sure, it is a worth while topic, both for the amateur but also for the professional and one not too far off the mark from an earlier post of mine on the the book by Ian Roberts, Creative Authenticity, 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen your Artistic Vision. Both individuals pretty much emphasize the need to for the artist/photographer to be emotionally involved. However, art that is personally, may not necessarily communicate. My issue is that current photography, in general communicates too much of the same thing, is not true of the history of the medium and is confusing photography with computer art.Now that I am back at working on my photography, there are a couple of blog posts to come on the state of digital black and white photography.  Stay tuned.