Peter M Howard ::

A Flickr photoset :: Europe in Black & White

19Aug2006 [personal]

(Skip straight to the photos: Europe in Black & White)

La Pyramide

I've been meaning to do something with all the photos I took last year for some time now. Soon after getting home I had a hundred or so printed out, but they're still sitting in the Kodak envelopes. I love black and white so I'm thinking I'd like to print out a handful and mount them to hang on the wall. Plus I have the screensaver on the iMac set to randomly select from my iPhoto library, and I keep coming back to the computer and thinking Wow! That's a really good photo, but having no idea where or when it was taken.

So, yesterday I sat down with iPhoto, turned on the random slideshow and watched (for a long time!) each photo for a couple seconds. Whenever I saw something with composition I liked, or that I thought would look good in black and white, I hit 3; a handful were particularly good photos and I hit 4 or 5. Then I filtered for ratings of 3+, and picked out a hundred or so to switch to black and white. I had a particular aesthetic in mind though, so I ignored most photos with people in them... (Not that I take many photos with people anyway; I kept coming across photos and thinking That'd look really good without that person in it.)

Then I went through that set and switched them to black and white; noticed that for most photos, black and white looked best with some adjustment in the levels to really bring out the contrast; a straight drop in saturation just turned them boring-grey.

Finally picked out a bunch to upload to a Flickr set; there's a monthly upload limit of 20MB so after converting to 1024x768 I could fit 73 photos. They're now living at Flickr in my Europe in Black & White photoset

Now I just have to select half a dozen or so that I can mount on the wall...

Side note: I'm not switching my ?photos set-up to Flickr; I'll keep putting albums here. But when I want to put 73 photos up, most of which are already in albums on this site (albeit in colour), Flickr serves admirably... When I cull the selection I'll put a smaller set on this site instead... I'm not really a fan of having bits of my content scattered all over sites controlled by other people

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