Light and Shadow

My WordPress journey began as a chronicle of my life and travels on the bike. The bigger, planned trips, and the smaller, more spontaneous ones. As I ride along, I never know when something is going to catch my eye, and inspire me to pull over.

Sometimes I work hard to capture what I see and sometimes I get lucky and the first shot just works. Other than conversion to B&W, this image is exactly as it was when it came out of the camera.

Let me know what you think and come visit me sometime at Life on The Bike.

Magic in the Garden

Black And White Photography

The garden sure is magical this time of year! This is zucchini blossom, tucked deep inside the vines. The light drifted in and out of the vines while I worked, the beauty of it all caught my eye and I had to capture it.

To see this blossom, and more in color, you can visit Robyn Graham Photography.

Broken Window

Black And White Photography, Elina, Photography

Does someone still tell stories of beautiful times spent living in this house… or are the memories buried deep inside and not worth remembering?

A broken window of an abandoned house. Makes me wonder what happened and why, and were there broken dreams as well?

Talk About The Weather

Black And White Photography, Emilio, Photography

“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it!” ~~ (Wrongfully) Attributed to Mark Twain

So who is the great thinker who designed an outdoor shopping/ restaurant center in the middle of Las Vegas, with little to no shade, knowing the temperature exceeds 100 degrees during the summer months? My wife would reply, “it was a man, of course!”

Of course!

If you like what you see, and even if you don’t, please visit my regular blog, too.

Steam Noir

Black And White Photography, Patti, Photography

A dark night of shadows, rain and rising steam in the streets of Philadelphia.

Photo from iPhone via strange experience of posting from iPad. As with Robyn from days before, laptop is now being repaired – the touch pad seized up and said very firmly “No More!”

The True Cost Of War

Black And White Photography, Joseph, Photography

1/600 @ f/6.4

“Never has there been a good war or a bad peace” – Benjamin Franklin

I frequently drive past this National Cemetery every week on my way to somewhere. It is almost one mile long by at least as deep of perfectly spaced white marble grave markers and beautifully manicured green lawn.

It is a very hard place to not be conscious of while driving past. Today seemed a little different and I was compelled to go in. It seemed fitting to pay my respects to these young men and women to whom I have never met, but yet had felt a deep sadness that all of them had lost their lives at too young an age.

More of my images can be seen at – The Visual Chronicle

These Boots …

Black And White Photography, Laurie, Photography

… were made for fighting wildland fires, and I wore them while battling the flames in Idaho over 30 years ago. Now, they serve to protect me while riding the bike. They’re just boots. Worn, scarred, dusty, and bearing remnants of fire retardant still … but they are precious to me.

The Shepherd´s Pipe

Black And White Photography, Joerg, Photography

My name is Joerg Thamer and due to technical difficulties I am exactly one week late to the party. What can I say, about the middle of May I got an invitation to join Monochromia, thanks Joe for the vote of confidence. It is both an honor and a pleasure for me to be part of this new photoblog.

I was born and raised in Hessen, Germany a village along the banks of the river Lahn and I still live there to this day. I have been running around with a camera since I was a little child. I was in charge of carrying my fathers Leica rangefinder around. From my early twenties on, I used photography as a tool to capture things I needed for my profession as a illustrator. Over the years a huge stockpile of photos were raised, mostly Diapos, and about 5 years ago I decided to clean up this “mess”.

What is left of them you can see (at least those I want to share), as well as my current images at this link to my site –

More of my images can be seen
at –

https://monochrome59.wordpress.com/

Serpent Star Fish

Black And White Photography

Well, it’s one of those weeks when mistakes have been made…that’s allowed, right? I took my computer in to have additional memory installed because all of my raw files are taking up so much space. I was so focused on getting “work” done before being without it, that I completely forgot to write my post for this week for Monochromia. So, desperately not wanting to disappoint, I searched my iPhone photograph library. Thankfully I had a few images from our trip to Grand Cayman that I had converted to black and white using the photo app. I selected one and emailed the image above of a Serpent Star Fish to our family laptop and voila, I have a post.

The picture isn’t the greatest quality as it was taken with my phone, but I found this creature to be quite intriguing and the composition was satisfactory. The Star Fish crawled out of a large Conch shell and drew quite a crowd on the beach. Kids stopped in their tracks, stopped playing catch, and ran to see what we’d found.

I had never seen a Star Fish like it before, but when we flipped it over to examine it, it had little tentacles and looked just like a Star Fish on the bottom. Upon doing an on-line search, we discovered that it was indeed a Star Fish – a Serpent Star Fish. Have you ever seen one? The center was black as coal.

Have a great weekend!