Some of you may know that my favorite photography magazine is Outdoor Photographer. In the August issue of the magazine there are some really great articles on black and white photography. You could say that the whole issue is almost dedicated to it. While I don’t do much black and white photography, the articles in the magazine did sparked an interest in me to do it more.

One of the articles, The Lost Art of Shooting Black and White, is really informative. One thing that it mentions is to set your camera to shoot in black and white mode (on my camera the mode is called “Mono”) and set the camera to shoot in RAW + JPEG. The reason for RAW and JPEG is because while you get the image in black and white with the JPEG, you also get the RAW image in color (RAW files can only capture color images.) You can then do a side-by-side comparison, in an image editing software, of what the photo actually looks like with the JPEG and edit the RAW file as a black and white photo to create a better contrast image. I had never really thought of that concept before, so I’ve given it a try and it’s helpful.

On another topic, I’ve just spent most of my weekend setting up a new computer and moving Lightroom 4 to it. This was done in preparation for the installation of Lightroom 5 in the near future. I can’t install Lightroom 5 on my older computer because it didn’t meet the requirements for the upgrade. Also, when I made the move from Lightroom 3 to 4, it was really hard on my older computer. Lightroom 4 is a real RAM sucker! It just slowed everything down. The new computer has much more RAM and really helped speed things up. It’ll also help with my website by making publishing much faster.

Hope everyone has a great week ahead. Be sure to take time out of your busy life and take photos during the week. It’s the only way you’re going to become a better photographer.