Sometimes my old love for black and white breaks through again, unstilled from FP4-times but suppressed by the “color is the new b&w” paradigma of the digital age: while color was the exception in the early days and b&w the “normal” thing, now it definitely is the other way round. Going monochrome of course offers traps enough, especially in the landscape: from Ansel Adams’ heroicism to Westons purity to Bill Schwab’s pictorialist style, seemingly everything has been done. But then, when being out there in the National Park Berchtesgaden, I didn’t think of those problems but instead enjoyed the abstraction that b&w brings, greatly alleviated by the monochrome mode of the viewfinder, another advantage of the mirror-free (¢ Kirk Tuck) cameras.
As the truth lies in the print, I already printed this set on sheets from my dwindling stock of Gold Fibre Silk, this time in a very small format fitting into a jewel-case-sized clear plastic box that reverses as a desktop calendar holder. And yes, I was very content with the rendering of the prints on the slightly chamois paper base.
The small images leads, as you will most probably have discovered by now, to the new gallery.
FWIW, with nearly every image I work with in the ‘virtual darkroom’, at some point I slowly slide the saturation control over to zero and the back again, to see how the presence/absence and degree of color affects the image.
One more control I would have loved to have had when I used film.
Yes, Tyler, and therefore I don’t share this film nostalgia. Photography has won a lot with mature digital technology.