I wanted to take us out of our comfort zone with the new challenge (this includes me). A lot of ideas came to me, but I finally settled on a black and white theme. I'm a color guy from way back, having been a slide shooter before I went digital, so this is relatively new territory for me. However, it certainly does take me back to my roots in photographic terms. Perhaps the same will be true for you.

The new challenge is all about black and white images. So, here are the rules of engagement. Slight tinting is okay, but no spot coloring. New images are preferred. Other than that, there are no holds barred.

For those of you that aren't sure how to process for black and white in Photoshop, I created a short black and white processing tutorial slideshow. I show two ways of doing it; one for CS3 and one for older versions of Photoshop. If you don't have Photoshop, you can download a 30-day trial version at no cost at this link: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/photoshop/

If you're shooting in digital, I encourage you to shoot in color and then convert to black and white in post-processing. You'll get much richer tones that way.

For example images, I went back to the scene of the 35W bridge collapse at sunrise yesterday. I thought that this subject would be stark in black and white. I found the scene to be powerful. This image shows the wide view of the scene of the collapse. The shadows being cast on the ruins are from the 10th Avenue Bridge, where I was standing to get this shot.

One other thing I think is interesting to experiment with in black and white is images that stay mostly in the shadows. I know we tend to think of high contrast when we think black and white. I captured these images at the Walker Art Center at the Sculpture Garden. I like the way the early morning sun outlines the face. These two images are actually a fair bit darker on Photographica than they appear on my computer because the color profile info is stripped from the image when we upload to Photographica. I have found through painful experimenting that this causes trouble for black and white images that are on the dark side because a ton of shadow detail is clipped. So if your images tend to run darker, you might want to try lightening them up a bit before uploading them to Photographica. I had to do that with most of mine.

So that's it, black and white. I know there are a lot of folks here that prefer color. I'm usually one of them. However, I think black and white is great for getting us to really focus on composition and foreground/background. After all, we can't rely on color to draw the viewer's attention where we want it to go.

Have fun with it. I look forward to seeing lots of interesting black and white images. I'll do my best to comment on all the challenge postings.