Now, that's not to say that I'm uncomfortable with black and white. On the contrary, I love it. Black and white calms things down, filters out distractions, and makes a moment feel timeless.
It's elegant.
But choosing which color digital photograph to make black and white is not the same thing as visualizing a picture that has to be all in shades of gray.
I worried about my subjects, about contrast, about blown highlights and blocked shadows and everything being the same shade of dull gray . . . . I made a hobby out of worrying. And the roll of 36 exposures seemed to stretch out in front of me forever. I was always going to have that dang roll of black and white film that I didn't know what to do with in the camera.
But I thought of a few tricks. One of them being, patterns of light and shadow. That always looks good in black and white, right?
And I think it kind of worked out. I don't love all of them, and I feel kind of like I'm missing the midtones, but I am happy with the feel of the images.
I also purposely kept a 35mm lens on the camera the whole time, as another constraint for my creativity. Mostly I think it was a good idea, but the types of scenes I envisioned with a 35mm (bustling street scenes, moody portrait shots), for most of these I was too unsure about the result to go ahead and take the picture. So I don't know if the focal length was the right call after all.
Anyway, if you had a roll of black and white in the camera, what would you take photographs of?
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