A Couple of New Awards

Let me proudly announce that I discovered a new area of photography. Which is called … black and white photography 🙂 .  Indeed, until recently the predominant majority of my images were in color, but black and white were almost nonexistent. And while some people are color blind, one could say that I was black and white blind.

This has changed lately and now I often feel (sometimes subconsciously) when an image is better in BW then in color. So maybe it is not an accident that a couple of awards that I was lucky to win recently were for black and white works. The first of them was Best in Show for the picture “Twisted” in the annual juried exhibition at Gallery 14 in Hopewell. The original image was taken in 2010, obviously in color, and was pretty pathetic. It had been sitting in the remote corner of my computer since then, but a few months ago I began to play with Nik Silver Effex Pro and chose this image for the first exercise. One click and the image suddenly became interesting:

The second award was First Place in Photography at the Mercer County Senior Art Show 2017 (sounds great except for the word “senior”, don’t you think?) for the picture “Hoboken Waterfront”:

This image was initially made in HDR by combining several exposures. As often with HDR, the resulting colors were a bit over the edge, distracting from the essence of the image. But what was distracting in color became captivating and maybe even a bit mysterious in BW.

As usual, all comments are welcome.