When I try to record life in my city I always try to edit my photos to be meaningful to a broad audience. I keep many photos to myself as they would probably mean nothing to other people. These are photos I took yesterday at a small festival.

Sometimes color is the way, sometimes black and white is. A few weeks ago I switched my Olympus Pen-F into monochrome view and did some architectural photography. It was a good exercise in visualization.

After arriving to the Festival, I started doing photos in black and white but, after a few frames, I realized some of them would only work in color. I could have kept on my black and white visualization exercise but… why?  Street photography is too fast paced to create perfectly exposed photos and choosing a color or black and white scheme on the way. The famous “decisive moment” is often very, very brief.

 

For the photos of the boy resting on his soccer ball, and the musician with the mannequin, my camera was in black and white mode. For the fashion show it was in color even though I knew that the photo with the police barrier would work best in black and white. The remaining photos beg not to be converted to black and white. Color is part of the composition in them and I knew it from the beginning.

One of the great things about mirrorless cameras or cameraphones is that you get to really pre-visualize your photos and learn along the way. Have you tried to shoot only in black and white mode or do you prefer to do the conversion later?