Laume's Studio

I participate, as regularly as I can, in a Flickr creative group called Shades of Inspiration. It's a fun bunch of photography friends and we all jump in with ideas to use for each week's theme. We started out with shades - brown, turquoise, plum... and moved on to color combinations - red, white and blue, or pink and brown. We also dabble with noncolor themes - like "reflections", "wet", "time", "vintage paper". Sometimes themes can be interpreted as a color OR not - for instance we did "rust" - either the color or something rusty.

This week's theme is black and white photography. It's been really interesting to see what images translate well into b&w. Both sharp contrast and subtle differences seem to work. Some photos need color, others that work well in color still work well in b&w. Most interesting, finding images where removing the color gets rid of unnecessary distraction and helps you focus on the subject matter or composition. It's been one of the better themes for really helping me see my images in new ways. It's been more work, but I feel as if I've learned a lot this week.

Of course I've been using lots of spooky images and they seem to be particularly amenable to being drained of color. Sort of like photographic vampirism. Mwahahaha.

Here are four images I've used this week. I like each of these both as color and as b&w images and I share both to show you how each presentation makes a difference. I'm not going to share my perceptions, instead I'll leave it to you to come up with your own and hopefully to share them with me to see if, or how, they differ from my own.

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To see more photos from the group, both mine and others, here's a link to the group photo pool.