More Black & White

I know it’s a little late but one of the disadvantages of film is that I’m just now getting all my film back from the lab. This is one of my attempts at a creative concept shots. The idea of taking pictures of Christmas decorations in black and white seems counter intuitive but I think I may be onto something here. I took several of these from different angles with different exposure settings but this is my favorite. Unfortunately I lost track of my bracketing settings but I know it was taken using Kodak Tri-X (INS 400) with the Promaster (all manual 35mm) body and the Pentax 28mm f2.8 lens wide open at about 1/15 shutter speed.

I could just as easily have taken this picture in full rich Christmas color (the stockings are bright red with fuzzy white trim) and it may have even looked good. Certainly it would be more Christmasy but I think the irony of taking such a photo in black & white somehow makes the composition more dramatic.

SIDE BAR – I just want to say it’s not the fault of the film or The Darkroom it took so long to get my Christmas film developed. I am one of those frugal types (some would say cheap) that agonizes over processing partially exposed rolls of film. Since it started raining the day after Christmas and continued almost non-stop for three weeks I didn’t even finish shooting the film until late January. I guess we can blame the weatherman if we must have a scape goat.