Some more monochromes, and back to film

During the week I took some more photos with my camera set to black & white, some of which I want to show here. The weather was a bit nicer sometimes, which explains my first visit to our employers’ gardens after these winter months. And I found a new sign there:

Ungrounded?

The morning after I also walked around the building, where I saw him:

Watcher of the skies

I also began to take photos “Moriyama style”, without even looking through the viewfinder or onto the rear display of my camera. Daido Moriyama once said that people instantly spot you if you take the camera up to look through it, so he often takes (or took) pictures “from the hip”. I tried it for instance while walking through our entrance door at work:

Revolving door, Moriyama-style

I also took this one of some other employees without looking:

A complicated door

In front of our building, there’s a taxi stand. And it’s mostly the same drivers (and most probably, owners of these cars) which are standing there. Because most of the day they’re just waiting for customers, they sometimes play a game of chess – and finally I took a photo of it (this one was framed with looking through my viewfinder again):

Das Spiel der Könige – Game of Kings

Though I *did* use some underexposure, the highlights here were still a bit of a problem, and I also applied some Kodak Tri-X film emulation onto the photo, which further boosted contrast and blacks.

The same evening, I took this one:

Plastic tree – see also Eduardo Leal’s work in LensCulture

During my next lunch break, someone was taking a nap:

Nap

Cropped that one into the 16:9 format; makes a nice desktop background for instance. And in the evening when taking the lift down on my way home, I took a “selfie” in that Moriyama style:

On my way home…

The next (yesterday’s) morning shortly after I arrived at work, and was on my way up to our second level offices, I caught Sergej the security guard on his lonely walk from buildings “A” to “C”. Here I also applied a Tri-X film emulation for a bit more contrast:

Frankfurt, 2016

So that’s it with photos from this week, and speaking of film: I was reading and re-reading the blogs and articles of some other photographers who use both film and digital cameras for their work, and while doing so I was often looking at our bookshelf, where Zuleikha and I still had some films waiting to be used. So it was a matter of time until I decided to load one into my OM-2 camera, and this is what I did today:

Back to film

As you can probably see, it’s Agfa precisa CT100 colour slide film which is inside the camera now, and I’ll be using it whenever I can. So no further uploads to Flickr, and no blogs with photos for a while, until I ran some rolls of film through my camera, and got them processed, and scanned to digital.

I want some real grain for a change, and I’m also very much looking forward to the more Zen-like experience of using film again (no chimping, no instant gratifications, no daily raw conversions, uploads, and so on). Slowing down a bit is good sometimes…

So let’s wait and see whatever I’ll produce with my “full frame” old SLR.

As always, thanks for reading.