Walking and shooting a 50, shooting black and white

Today was a pretty good day. We started off with a trip over to my grandparents for breakfast, some homemade biscuits and gravy over some good conversation. Then we ran some errands around town on the way home from my grandparents. Once we got home we had the requisite activity time in the front yard with Ruckus before taking him on a walk. I had grabbed the Leica quickly before we set off on a short walk with Ruckus and Jess had made the comment while we were walking that she’d wished she’d also grabbed a camera before we left. So when we got back she grabbed the Canon 6D and we set out again for a walk around the neighborhood. I took the Leica and the 50mm Elmar again.

I’ve been shooting color pretty much exclusively now for a couple months if not longer but for shits and giggles today I decided to set the JPEG preview function on the Leica to black and white and just go out with the intention of shooting monochrome from start to finish. I’ve hit a weird point lately with color vs monochrome imagery. When I try to process images in black and white I just look at the work and it feels empty and lifeless in monochrome, like something essential is missing. I hear you saying, “Uh, yeah. It’s the color…” And that’s obviously part of it. But it’s also started to feel like color has unlocked something in my work that the black and white stuff just hasn’t/doesn’t fully express. I’m not sure how else to say it in any more detail than that because I don’t fully understand what’s happening.

Having said that, this was the first set of monochrome images I’ve made in a while that actually felt like they weren’t missing that weird esoteric something. I’m willing to chalk up a lot of the legwork on that to the Leica Elmar. That lens is always able to render things in such a beautiful way in black and white. It works beautifully in color too but it really sings in black and white images. Something about that old optical design and older coatings that produces such a beautiful range of grays in black and white that give the images such a rich nuance of tones. All this to say I was actually pretty surprised to get home and start working on the photos and find that I ended up keeping all of them in black and white instead of processing them as color photos. Is my color stint over? Eh, probably not. I still really enjoy shooting in color and I’m still trying to plumb the depths of this weird intangible things that my color work seems to be getting at that feels missing in much of the monochrome work I’d done/continue to do. We press on.

We actually ended up going on another walk later in the evening. We were washing one of the cars and Jess made the comment that the light was prettier in the evening than when we’d gone on the first walk and so I said that we should take another walk. She went and grabbed the Canon again and I opted for the Leica again but threw on the 28mm for fun before leaving the house. It was fun to shoot with the external finder and zone focused but I much preferred the results from the 50mm lens. Shocking, the self professed 50mm guy liked the 50mm. Anyways, if you’re reading this thanks for taking a look!