These photos are my 3 entries in the first round of the 2004 Practical Photography Competition. I nearly didn’t bother entering, as the closing date is 2nd February, I was tired last night and I would have preferred to play a round of Tiger Woods 2004 golf on the PS2 (not that I’m addicted to it or anything).

Fortunately I made myself dig out some photos to fit the theme of “Patterns in the Landscape”. These images were all originally shot in colour, the first 2 on the Canon EOS 10D and the last one on negative film. I thought I would try converting them to black and white to help concentrate on the pattern, and I think all 3 shots have definitely benefited from the conversion. The first two in particular have printed out well on the Epson Stylus Photo 2100 printer on Ilford Smooth Pearl paper - the 3rd one looks a little soft and I probably shouldn’t have entered it.

I don’t think there’s a winner here, but entering the compeititon has had the happy side-effect of showing all 3 photos in a better, black and white light. I’ll definitely be trying out this conversion on some more shots to see if they are improved too.

For all those who are interested, I used a Photoshop action called “Johny’s B&W Package V2.0” to do the conversion from colour to black and white, available as a free download here:
http://www.jakerlund.net/index.php