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Holy cow! This week is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. Some very talented photographers sharing outstanding B&W pictures! I love all of them so much that I’m going to take a week off from sharing anything myself.

~ Todd

Now on to this week’s images …

Chuck Marshall:

Photo of Jeramie Kling, drummer for The Absence. Took this one early in my concert photography journey in 2014 at the Token Lounge in Westland, MI. Most of my shots that night were not too sharp, but this one came out pretty good. I've always liked the fierce intensity on Jeramie's face.

Don Giannatti:

I am always looking for little vignettes of life. This little house is in the town of Miami, Arizona. I knew the moment I saw it that it had to be black and white. I always toned my analog black and white prints, so I used NIK Silver Effects for the selenium tone. I do not do image manipulation (removal tools, collaging tools, or AI in my personal photography.)

Lauri Novak:

I went to White Sands National Park when it was gray and rainy. On my way out of the area the next day, I drove by the entrance, turned around and spent two more hours in the park. What a difference a day made with the light, morning dew and big huge puddles.

Inside Wedding Photography

Sometimes you don't get to choose the spot where a bride and groom choose to meet before the wedding for a little "private peek."

Weddings are filled with unexpected twists like this and that's one reason I love weddings so much.

Creativity comes in so many flavors...even black and white!

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Also, please consider clicking over to the photographer’s main publications to check out more of their art. I’m sure they’d appreciate your support!

Catch you next week,

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All contributors to the project so far:

Chris Humphrey | Lauri Novak | Valley Images | Lisa E | Jason Kravitz | JWSmith Photography | KerryArt | Marjorie | Kelly | Porch Talks with Brandon Tosti | Michael Arndt| Mat | |

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Now on to this week’s images …

Mat Coker:

I took this photo at an indie wrestling match in Canada, and it’s one of the few that worked in monochrome. The moment had a graphic-novel feel to it, and monochrome stripped away the unnecessary colour. I love the edge light around the wrestler and along the ropes. It was a challenging lighting environment, and this is one of the shots I keep coming back to!

Todd Takes Pictures:

I took a bit of a down week myself, so I think I’m going to reach back into the archives and share this 2025 image of a Littoral Combat Ship off the coast of San Diego. We were staying at the Navy Lodge at North Island. The fog had just burned off and ship was a bit silhouetted even in the color version. Processing it in B&W matched how I saw this scene in real life … or at least highlighted what I thought was important in it.

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Also, please consider clicking over to the photographer’s main publications to check out more of their art. I’m sure they’d appreciate your support!

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Now on to this week’s images …

Brandon Tosti, Author:

This was taken from the back porch of our cabin that we co-own/share with another family.

I loved the paint chipping and tried to capture it.

Todd Takes Pictures:

I haven’t really decided that this is a personal photography “project” per se (although I probably have enough images from different locations to start it), but we do try to get a shot or two the Jeep in its “natural environment” when we are out and about. This image is from our most recent road trip, and was captured near the Verde River on a cloudy morning just after the rain had stopped.

Michael Arndt:

When Jen and I were dating and I was thinking of popping the question, I planned a thirty day car trip together thinking if we still felt the same way about each other after that, it was a go. This was taken on DAY 29.

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Also, please consider clicking over to the photographer’s main publications to check out more of their art. I’m sure they’d appreciate your support!

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Now on to this week’s images …

Todd Takes Pictures:

We just returned from a 5 day road trip up to Page Arizona. This image that I took of Kelly up ahead of me just before we entered a remote canyon wasn’t even the most iconic scenery we saw that day. But I think it does a good job of capturing our preferred type of hikes: just us out in a vast natural environment, with as few other people around as possible.

Kurious Kelly Wandering :

My oldest child has milky skin, dark features and often chooses bold make up. I'm biased I'm sure, but she makes a perfect black and white model.

Lauri Novak:

On a recent road trip, I spent part of a day driving around to see all of the Bruce Goff homes and buildings. This is the Quaker Avenue home rooftop. As luck would have it, the Tulsa Architecture Foundation had an open house here on the day I stopped.

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All contributors to the project so far: , , , , , , , ,

Previous weekly posts:

Week 4:

Week 3:

Week 2:

Week 1:

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Now on to this week’s images …

Inside Wedding Photography

How can I not show off a photo of my brand new granddaughter!

Having shot a number of newborns in the hospital my process is pretty straightforward, Mom holds baby, position near window with indirect sunlight.
Most of newborn clothes are white so wrap in a white blanket and move in close. Pretty easy and these photos are great for announcements.

Todd Takes Pictures:

For this week’s contribution, I’m going to throw all the way back to an image that I took the first time I was at Fort Huachuca in January of 2025. Even though I live in a location with beautiful desert scenery, I haven’t really thought of myself as a landscape photographer. That said, some of the scenes I have captured over the years (such as this single lenticular cloud) do lend themselves well to high contrast black & white processing.

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Now on to this week’s images …

Jason Kravitz

I was on a photo walk In Brussels, Belgium with a bunch of other photographers when we came across another gathering of people, a mustache club. There was probably a more official name to their organization but I don't recall and the end result is they each had an immaculately trimmed stash. This was years ago before hipsters decided mustaches were cool again. These guys kindly posed for me and probably 8 other photographers on our walk. Felt like a B&W portrait would bring out the finer textures in their facial features.

JWSmithPhotography

On a well traveled road in North Berwick, Maine the stump I've named "The Drum Major" for its outstretched arms and dynamic pose. It stood there with its marching band following for the first few years I lived here. At some point I decided to photograph it and it's a good thing because a month later it was gone.

Todd Takes Pictures:

My 16 year daughter just started her 3rd year as a varsity cheerleader. She still attends tumbling class twice a week though. This week I got to go with her. This is an image of her and her coach discussing strategy to improve her back handspring.

Kerry Art

The McDowell Mountains with dramatic clouds taken from our balcony in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Marjorie McDonald

While on my cross-Canada road trip this month, I found myself in Austin, Manitoba. There's very little in Austin, but there is the Manitoba Agricultural Museum, which hold the largest collection of vintage equipment. I was the only visitor, free to wander the expansive grounds that housed over 500 pieces of machinery and over 20 historical buildings, including artifacts. This shot is taken in one of the settler houses. The pocket of light that fell on the humble kitchen table setting immediately caught my eye.

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Do any of these images speak to you? Tell use what you think.

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Also, please consider clicking over to the photographer’s main publications to check out more their art. I’m sure they’d appreciate your support!

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Now on to this week’s images …

Inside Wedding Photography

I typically only get a few minutes to shoot my couple after the ceremony and before the reception. Add to that pressure, when the couple wants a "cool shot" in front of their reception site...in midday sun. No good light for eye contact. Turn a face toward the sun and use what you got. It's not about the light, it's about couple. ~ Chris aka CHphotowriter

chickybus

• Where: Cefalù, Sicily.

• Original plan: to do nothing.

• What caught my eye: silhouettes of people and contrast

• How it began: a girl started doing handstands and cartwheels right in front of me. I grabbed my camera (iPhone 16 Pro) and snapped away. Then, I noticed the hunky lifeguard, who looked like a modern-day BayWatch character, keeping an eye on things. Soon, it was a photographic adventure more than just a day at the beach.

• It became the subject of a complete photo essay here on SubStack. All photos are b/w with a silvertone effect. ~ Lisa E

Todd Takes Pictures:

The majority of the images that I normally share are brightly colored nature pictures. But I’m always looking for opportunities to try my hand at street photography; and this weekly B&W project is a perfect place to share the results of those efforts. In this case, Kelly’s son Timmy and his friends stopped by the house for some pre-homecoming dance pictures. In these situations, I always capture at least a few more candid type images before we get to the posed shots. The body language and facial expressions in this one below stood out to me.

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p.s. we’d love to hear your comments here, but please also considering clicking over to the photographer’s publications to see more of their work.

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Submit Your Own Image(s)

There’s just something about Black & White images. Don’t get me wrong, I love a colorful sunset, or the pop of blue or red from bird in a tree. But knowing I’m going to process an image in monochrome forces me to think more about the scene, the lines, the light, and the contrast. I don’t think I’d want to shoot nothing but B&W, but it sure is a fun once a week project.

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Now on to this week’s images …

Todd Takes Pictures:

My just turned 18 year old daughter got her first tattoo or piercing that I didn’t have to sign a consent form for. She was in the chair for over 7 1/2 hours, but she found a very talented apprentice to do the art. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, how little she paid for this tattoo.

Perspectives - Photography & Writing

Lauri Novak is a fine art photographer and author from Chicago. For this week’s contribution she shared a couple of very cool high contrast architectural shots that she captured in her city.

Valley Images

Dave is my new friend from Australia. Checking out his feed it looks like he mostly shoots wildlife and nature shots like I do. But as you can see below, his black and white images are pretty compelling too.

Inside Wedding Photography

Finally, we’ll wrap things up with my friend Chris who writes a weekly newsletter about the ins and outs of starting a wedding photography business. If you want to learn about photography, marketing, or even just dealing with people, it’s worth looking forward to every weekend.

Submit Your Image(s)

p.s. if this ever grows to a point where we have to limit the number of slots each week, those who got in at the beginning will always have spot if they want it.

Catch you next week,

This is one of my favorite images from our trip to San Diego in Feb. 2025.

Catch you next week,

In 2005 I spent a year at Camp Humphries in Korea. By that point I’d been in the Air Force for 15 years, and I’d spent 15 years trying to avoid getting sent to Korea.

It’s was only about 2-3 weeks after I arrived that I looked in the mirror and asked myself: What was I thinking not wanting to come here?

I was there to forecast the weather, and sometimes had to work hard. But I’m pretty sure we also went down to “The Ville” just about about every evening.

I of course carried my camera almost everywhere I went. I was shooting with an almost new at the time Canon 20D, which usually had either a Tamron 28-75 F2.8 or the “Nifty-Fifty” F1.8 lens attached. I took thousands of pictures during that year. Some of my favorites were the ones that I chose at the time to process in Black & White. Those are the ones I’m sharing here.

These days I mostly take pictures of landscapes and wildlife. But apparently in 2005, I really enjoyed taking pictures of people … especially at the bar.

I don’t even mind the low-light camera shake and high ISO noise in almost all of these images. Kind of makes them feel really “authentic”.

Many of the images I captured were semi-discreet “street” style shots. But I also got some portraits of my workmates, where I’m pretty sure they were aware that my camera was pointed in their general direction anyway. 😎

Being the guy who was known for always having his “nice” camera with him, of course when it was time to get a group work photo, I was assigned the task.

There were other (more “serious”) shots, but for some reason this is the one I had converted to B&W. I brought in a tripod, set the 10 second timer, then sprinted (ha!) back to take my place in the group … can you guess which one is me?

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For me, track and cross country season present an opportunity to take pictures of people, instead of mostly the animals and scenery I normally capture here in southeast Arizona.

Most of the daytime meets photograph very nicely in color. But a couple of times a years when the races take place after the sun goes down, many of the images I capture already have some motion blur and contrasty lighting.

It’s like they’re almost begging …

This was especially the case with my Sony a6000 and TTArtisans 25mm manual lens combination. I’m still getting used to the exposure and metering settings in low-light with this camera. Even with this lens, I use Aperture priority, but since there are no electronic connections the F-stop is not recorded in the exif data.

The sunset shot above I believe was either F5.0 or maybe even F8.0. It was a 1/60 second exposure at ISO 250. It looks like I had a little camera shake, but there’s something about the over-all look of the final image that I like anyway.

The crowd shot below as also taken with the Sony. This one I’m almost positive was wide-open at F2.0. Also 1/60th of second, and ISO 3200.

The images below were taken on my Canon 80D with a 70-200 F2.8L lens attached. lol, yes, I was one of those guys walking around with multiple cameras around my neck and in my hands. I suppose if you count the very capable Pixel 9pro XL phone in my pocket, I technically had three different cameras.

I did of course also take some pictures of the runners themselves.

Whether it’s day or night, I like these shots of runners where there is a nice combination of motion blur from the movement of the runners, combined with a few in focus and sharp facial expressions.

To wrap things up, I’ve know Coach Bristow for 4 years now, and at every meet I always like to get at least a couple of image of him doing his thing.

Catch you next week,

Catch you next week,

A few Black & White photographs from this past week.

In week one I’m still finding my style, but if I had to pick my own favorite image from this past week, it’s this group of birders at Ramsey Canyon. I’ve gotten into the habit of draping one of my small light cameras around my neck, even while I’m carrying the 80D with the big Sigma Lens. In this case the 14mm manual lens I had attached to the EOS M captured the scene perfectly (the lens has strong vignette, but I kind of dig the look), then it worked even better in B&W.

We had a B-1 bomber do a touch and go approach at our airfield on Thursday. I’m still editing most of the hundreds of images that I took. This shot below is one that looked equally cool in both color and black and white.

Also on Thursday, it rained really hard in the afternoon, so we headed up to the waterfall in town to see it running. We weren’t the only ones. There were a lot of cars parked along the side of the road. These four teens apparently parked even further away and walked most of the way up the mountain. I like the contrasty “just before sunset” lighting in this scene.

This single monsoon thunderstorm cell started firing off just after sunset on Friday night. Fortunately I had a tripod in the Jeep, and I’d been wanted to try long (2 second in this case) exposures with the 14mm manual lens. I’m happy with the way this scene turned out.

Most of my wildlife photography will be processed in color and posted over on The Open Vista. But this shot of two leopard frogs, with the way the light was providing such nice contrast just screamed “I need to be shown in B&W”.

Catch you next week,

Do you like nature and wildlife pictures (in color)?

Check out my other site:

Todd Takes Pictures

Birds, insects, reptiles, wildlife, weather, and the beautiful scenery of southeast Arizona.