When I first started photography back in the 1980's I was shooting only with Ilford HP5 black and white film. The reason for this was simple and it wasn’t an artistic choice, unfortunately, the darkroom at school could only develop black and white film plus HP5 was also the only film that was made available to us students.
The first time I picked up a digital camera I fell into old habits and set the camera to black and white and just continued shooting the way I was taught and I continued to shoot this way while I was shooting with a DSLR, I had no idea what the difference was between RAW and JPEG I also had no idea how to edit digital photos, photoshop was all foreign to me. Over the first few years of shooting digital I taught myself how to edit the photos using adobe software however I was reluctant to move away from black and white and it wasn’t till I started shooting with Fujifilm that I began to move towards colour.
The classic chrome preset was beautiful and easy to work with and if you go back to my early blogs you’ll discover how I made the move into colour photography and now I feel as if I'm coming full circle since I upgraded to the Fujifilm X-T3 I’ve been doing more black and white. What I didn’t know until I started to use the camera was Fujifilm had updated all the film simulations to version 2 and I’ve been struggling to use the camera in colour. I'm finding that the camera is pushing me back towards black and white, especially when I'm shooting indoors with low light or when shooting at night.
I'm discovering the colour photos coming out of X-T3 classic chrome preset are appearing more orange than they should be and they get worse when editing them in lightroom or capture one and it just takes to long to get the colour’s looking right, I hate editing at the best of times and this is just making it worse, I have spent a bit of time going through the settings on the camera trying to get the colour looking right. when I’ve had a day shooting I can’t wait to get the photos onto the iMac and start going through them, but since buying the X-T3 I’ve found that I’m just leaving them on the SD card and in some extreme cases I’ve deleted them because I know the editing is going to be a pain in my ass.
I find that I'm struggling to make the colours work for me I’m struggling so much with the colours that I'm contemplating switching cameras and going back to the X-T2 which has almost perfect colours that are easier to edit, maybe that’s a bit extreme so I’ve been looking at other options open to me.
One option that I keep coming back to that doesn’t require me to sell the camera is a black and white project, if I play this struggle to my advantage and push myself for the next 12 months shooting in only black and white, that would give me something to focus my work on a challenge, I think this is what’s been missing not having a project like Starbucks or the Tate modern has left me and my work feeling empty and I’m sure setting myself a new project will help, a personal project called A year in monochrome.
I would of course post monthly updates here on the blog, I'll post the best 10 photos taken each month. So yes let’s do this, each month I’ll post my favourite photos taken and we’ll see how I cope with the challenge of just taking black and white images.
I hope you follow me on this journey and I hope to find my way over the coming 12 months and I have to say that I’m really looking forward to the challenge of limiting myself to monochrome.
