I’m not going to post a photo that I took today for today’s post. This one I took two weeks ago in Sydney and I’ve been ‘working on it’ for a couple of hours for my (long overdue) homework that it feels like I took this one just today, and it deserved to be shared today considering the time we spent together.

My homework this time was all about colours. Understanding the colours, how they work and how they affect each other, including learning the many shades of grey. And today I was doing the grey part of it. I never knew there are so many ways to convert your colour photos to black and white (B/W). I knew how to do it (the click one button way), but this homework assigned me to try all different sorts of ways, using Photoshop and other software (in my case, Aperture). When I said I was ‘working on it’ that’s what I meant. I was turning my colour landscape photo to B/W photo trying several different methods (as instructed), and try to figure out which one I like best. I did not do more editing than the usual stuff (exposure, contrast, saturation etc), so you won’t see any ‘fake’ clouds or water ripples as I don’t know how to do ‘heavy lifting’ photoshop like that. Not yet anyway…

It was a brilliant day that day. This photo was taken on a ferry from Circular Quay to Darling Harbour. The sky was blue with funnily shaped clouds scattered here and there. During editing, I learned how to use the colour filters (Red, Green, Blue and others) which I was scared to use before, since I had no clue what they are for. Now I started to get it. It’s quite exciting, really, how there’s so much more to learn behind the ‘simple’ black and white picture, because like most things, a Black and White picture is never ‘just’ black and white.

Nikon D90|AF-S DX VR Zoom-Nikkor 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6G ED|ISO 400|f/7.1 | 1/2500| focal length 22mm