Monochromia

White Bark

Black And White Photography, Kirk, Photography

tree trunk-1

This image was made awhile ago and I just came across it. I was out shooting with an intern on assignment for the group of newspapers I worked for at the time as a Photo Editor.  I was teaching this intern about light and how B&W can be such a powerful tool. This tree had white bark that could not be ignored. I had the Leica M-P 240 and the 50mm Summilux with me and worked on this composition knowing that I would convert to B&W since the only real color was the sky. The texture on the tree just popped once it was converted.

 

 

Tangled up in vines

Black And White Photography, Photography, Steven

Tangled Tree © Steven Willard

I struggled at first when I tried to refine the composition of this photograph. I thought there should be a way to crop, or a better angle to simplify the image. I was fighting with reality. In the end, I accepted the fact that what drew me to the image in the first place was the chaos, and how the eye wants to zigzag all over the frame before it lands on the little “bullseye” in the top center of the image. It was an image that knew what it wanted to be before I did.

Olympus OMD-EME1 with 12-40mm f2.8 zoom converted to black and white using Silver Efex Pro 2 in Lightroom.

You can see more of my images at https://stevenwillardimages.wordpress.com