Five Day B&W Challenge: Day 5

"Momentito"

During a four-day vacation in Mexico, I captured this photo of two people hugging at the side of the street. I loved the juxtaposition of the bus's motion in the background with the stillness of their embrace.

From a conversion perspective, this image was pretty straightforward. The challenge was more of a personal struggle — I love the streaks of red on the pair's clothes, but I think it still works out pretty well in black and white. I tried to crop it in a way that would reduce the amount of distraction without eliminating context. I didn't want to focus so much on them that you lose track of their surroundings, or that you lose the feeling of the street moving around them.

Five Day B&W Challenge: Day 4

Earlier this year, I visited some friends in New York City, and we took some time to visit the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The Memorial consists primarily of two square-shaped waterfalls, which are somewhat distinct in that they are so large, but so easy to interact with. The walls of water are dozens of feet tall, and hundreds of feet wide, but the water originates in a mirror pool that you can swirl with your fingertips before it pours over the edge, and your influence can alter the continuously-changing pattern that the water makes as it falls.

The names in the memorial are inscribed in bronze panels and mounted where people can touch them. Feel them. Mull them over and ponder them. I noticed that a lot of visitors would stand at the edge, pause with a hand on the stone, and just look out over the water.

For the B&W conversion, the main challenge here was that the man's shirt is overexposed in the blue channel. After a couple different attempts to bring his shirt down without adversely affecting the rest of the image, I decided to just crop him mostly out. The final image shows him, and shows his contact with the child, but focuses on the child and the child's experience of the memorial.