...or Monochrome for those of us in the photography world. I've been having trouble with the quality of my photos in my film class and I'm sure part of it has to do with getting back into the routine of cleaning the negatives, processing film, and keeping my hands off of the middle of my photo paper, but I think it mostly has to do with the fact that I simply no longer think in monochrome. Back when I first started taking pictures, it was with a film camera, and was in color. When I took Photo I in high school, it wasn't that hard to get my brain to think in black and white. I really hadn't been really focusing on photography before that so it wasn't that hard to get the rewiring done. When I got my P80, my first digital camera, I almost instantly switched over to color. I started to take some black and white stuff, but I was more focused on more important things like learning how to make higher quality photos and taking a crash course in sports photography for my work with Kent Valley Sports. I thought I'd successfully entered the world of photography and am now shooting to go "pro". It wasn't until I developed my first role of film at school during this second go around at Photo 101 that I started to realize that I had lost something just as much as I had gained something when I made the switch from Film to Digital. It really hit me when my photo didn't get one vote the photo of the week in my class this week. I know some of it is because I need to refine my developing and printing processes, but there were a lot of photos in the class which were simply better than mine. Without trying to toot my own horn, I know I can produce better photos than most of the other people in the class and way way better than the ones I've been producing. Because I do take so many photos, I can pretty easily go between "Sports Mode" and "Creative Mode". I'm going to need a lot of that creative stuff to re-wire my brain again to look at the monochrome side of things. So as a brilliant solution to my problem, I go back to digital. I know that doesn't make much sense, but during the summer, considered to be the "Slow" season for sports, I can really focus on the problem and Digital is way easier for me. I have changed my camera to only take monochrome photos for the duration of this experiment. If I need to shoot color for something on WPS, I can easily change it back, but this will force me to think in B&W. Because I have my DSLR with me at all times except at school, I can also test the photos on my DSLR before committing to a photo with the film. Digital film is cheap, and I've already paid for about 100 years of infinite memory. I have also switched the lenses that I will keep on the camera. I have a 50mm lens on the film camera for the class so I'll keep my 50mm lens on my DSLR so everything but the image format (Digital vs Film) will be the same from one camera to the next. I can't wait to get started. I haven't been this excited to just get out and shoot in a long time. TIME TO GET BIZZAY!!!
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