Waikiki in Black & White

5/365

The other day my friend and I went to Waikiki with the intention of doing some street photography only in black & white.  We both LOVE black & white and I remember back in the day when the only  way to shoot b&w was to insert an entire roll of b&w film into the camera.

If you decided you wanted to switch to color halfway through the roll, you either had to stick it out and finish the roll or remove it which was pretty tricky to do.

Now....with digital, it's just a matter of switching functions. 

But shooting b&w is a different animal than shooting color.  You have to "see" differently and anticipate what will look good and what won't.  Sometimes it's easier to shoot in color and then convert to b&w on the computer.  Part of me thinks that's cheating.  Part of me thinks that's cool.

Shooting in a b&w function forces you to be more discerning--you know that the image has to stand on the merits of composition and contrast without the impact of beautiful color to grab the viewer's attention.  Of course, the digital darkroom can really enhance any image, as did the wet darkroom, so some images can be salvaged.

So we set our cameras on b&w and began shooting.

After we finished at the beach, we headed over to our favorite Starbucks.  We did a little practice with panning and slow shutter speed.  I didn't have my tripod and I was just trying to teach my friend how to do these techniques, so I really didn't anticipate having any keepers.  Most of the images I shot were deleted, but these next three appealed to me.  

(Although the camera was hand-held, I was resting the camera on a newspaper box)