Monday, 22 October 2007

First roll of black and white

Crane, Canary Wharf, London, July 2007

In all the years I've had cameras and taken photos I've not, until recently, actually used B&W film. Mostly, I suppose, because I was part of the happy-snapper crowd.
Well I finally got round to turning the roll I shot this summer into final images. I was using Ilford HP5 plus 400 so that I had plenty of scope for flash-free photography. I loaded it into my old SLR with a 50mm lens.

2 things surprised me about the outcome - first is that I can take decent photos with black and white. I was consciously thinking of shapes and forms. For the people shots, I'd probably have converted colour to B&W anyway. The second surprising thing was the distance to subject that worked best. normally with a 50mm I think middle distances, say 10-100m (first of the examples below). With this film, however, it was the close-up that worked best. Maybe a result of detail overcoming grain, but I can't really be certain. Anyway, here are some of the results:




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