A world in B&W | Scene Through the Lens

My photo this week is presented here in black and white in deference to our staff photographers project.

» READ MORE: One Roll: An Inquirer photography project uses film to step back and slow down.

I first mentioned our project here, a while back. My colleagues and I each took turns shooting with a 35mm mechanical camera with manual exposure and focus using just one roll of black-and-white film and one lens, a 50 mm f/1.8.

The result ran over four pages in the Sunday print edition yesterday. It serves as an end-of-the-year reminder to slow down.

The idea was that film forces a digital photographer to be more deliberate and intentional.

One of my included pictures was taken on my very first day with the B&W camera. I had driven many times past a large tree that fell during a big storm. I’d never stopped to photograph it because it just wasn’t a “newspaper kind” of picture, a dead tree there all by itself in the middle of a field. But with the new camera and my new mission in mind, this time I pulled over. The tree’s sun-bleached limbs just called for a closeup to capture the wood’s smooth, worn texture.

While it’s not a “newspaper picture,” making it - and pictures like it made during our B&W staff project - do help to make a “newspaper photographer” see new things in old places.

And, to be honest, it wasn’t really the B&W part of the project that helped me to slow down. it was more the deliberative process of thinking about the subject, and composing a single image - much like early photographers looking under a dark cloth onto the ground glass of a large format camera.

Since 1998, a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color:

» SEE MORE: Archived columns and Twenty years of a photo column