Colors and Night. A Saturday Walkabout.

Downtown Scottsdale 2/3/2018

For this past weekend's walkabout, I had to switch to a night time outing because I had some things to take care of early in the morning of Saturday, that prevented me from being able to do my usual early morning walkabout.

Early in January I had attended a workshop by Joseph Podlesnik, during which we had walked about Downtown Scottsdale during the day time and I found myself, in the back of my mind curious about walking these scenes at night. Thus I decided to head Downtown Scottsdale this past Saturday night.

The theme of this post became obvious to me until later in the following week, I found myself editing the pictures from the nighttime walkabout that I noticed I hardly ever go black and white in the few nighttime photos I've taken in the past, and this sat on my mind until a day later I asked myself: Why not black and white?

With any given photo, due to the relatively easy black and white option that Adobe Lightroom gives you, I usually tend to switch back and forth between color and black and white, at least several times. It may be due to my relative inexperience in the field, but I usually find myself analyzing the role of color and certain textures when I switch back and forth like this. When originally shooting the photo I hardly think whether I'm going to land on b/w or color for any given scene.

After this back and forth, with my night time photos in particular, I noticed at that moment that I tend to leave these in color almost exclusively (I say almost because to be 100% sure I would have to go through 7k of photos).

I think I'm attracted to how the overall darkness of the scenes interacts with the colors the light illuminates within.

I'm considering printing some of these and framing them with white mat and white frame, and see how that looks like, hang them on a wall, and have them there for my occasional viewing and continue pondering the relationship between darkness and color.

Andres Gonzalez