Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum

This image has been added to all of the PRINTS galleries.

I stripped away the color in this image on purpose. In this instance it was interfering with what I want you to see. The color in the original image was just another level of information that your brain has to process. In monochrome, each building is viewed equally and is now defined only by the lines they are made up of. I do not want you to be distracted by blobs of color because I want you to focus on those lines.

I volunteered to be a chauffeur to take Dottie to St. Michaels, MD one day for an appointment she had. While she was busy, I took advantage of the free time and rode down to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. What you view in this image is the rooftops of the lighthouse and several other buildings and the mast of a boat on the museum grounds.

It is this simplicity of focus that can make black and white photography so effective. I constantly keep the notion of black and white images in the back of my mind when playing with the camera. There are moments when I am looking at something and say, “that would be so good in black and white”. This image was not one of them, though. I discovered how much I really liked it once I converted it to monochrome, while processing the image. It was a very pleasant and unexpected surprise.