A while back I went mad over black and white conversions. This was partly because I seem to see in black and white and partly because at that time I didn’t really understand color photography that well. Sometimes the conversion was appropriate, other times it wasn’t. Since then after immersing myself in William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz, Ernst Haas, Saul Leiter, Alex Webb, Stephen Shore, Alec Soth at al. I’ve become a little more comfortable with color and consequently I’ve largely moved away from black and white conversions. However, the Native American Chief in my last post seemed to call for a black and white treatment.

A short time after I took that picture I took this one of the Pocantico River as it passes through Briarcliff Manor, and decided to convert it to black and white too. I’m not entirely sure that it works. Maybe I was mistakenly just trying to make a not terribly inspiring color photograph look a bit better.

Taken in mid April 2023 with an iPhone SE II.