Today (or tonite according to your GMT) I'd like to touch the black & white topic, by showing three personal ways of dealing with! I'll use three photos, of which the first was taken in Fukuoka in August 9, 2009, whereas the other two were taken here in Lisbon on February 9 (the umbrella) and yesterday the last one. The first and the last has been postproduced today, while the second one is a bit older (two days, maybe), and you can notice this difference on the editing.
They have very little in common. Apart for the black & white, I think that they belong to separate kind of photography.
Let's begin with the older one. I entitled it infanzia or childhood and I simply love it!
I love the shot - the inclination of the camera gives to the whole scene further movement that is enhanced by the playing children, although the young girl, with her position, seems to stop the other children and give me the chance to push the button! Therefore, the timing is another plus to the shot: they jump, they land, they run, they don't move and this presence of different movements is well conveyed by the editing, with its good contrast and clarity!
1/60 sec F/6.3 iso-100 67mm
The second pic I'm going to talk about is a photo that was born in my mind a long time ago, at least since the day I saw for the first time Lisbon under the rain, most precisely the day-after, when you find everywhere broken umbrellas. I has been thinking a lot about taking a series of photo of broken umbrella, but I never really started this portfolio. Some days ago, notwithstanding this lazyness, I found this thrown-away umbrella and fortunately I was carrying my camera with me. Moreover, the wall was almost completely uniform - except for some dirty spots - and there was this spotlight that helped me a lot to create a dramatic effect. In postproduction I turned the photo to b/w, added contrast (a lot of) and the vignetting and then I used the preset of Photoshop CS4, crossprocessing, over the black and white to enhance further the contrast and overlapped this level to the original by reducing it to the 50%, and that's were the green tone comes from.
1/50 sec F/3.5 iso-400 25mm