Black and White

Black and White!
This is the theme for one of the monthly photo contests for one of the Yahoo photo groups I belong to.

For today's lunch time photo project, I decided to play around with that theme.

This is the original photo.  A white child (my niece Marielle) and a black child playing together.  It kinda fits the Black and White theme.

However, I think the real idea behind the "Black and White" theme is to use a black and white photo.  I really don't see much purpose in shooting in "Black and White".  It is so easy to convert a color photo into Black and White, but much more difficult to go from "Black and White" to color.

So I decided to do a little Photoshop work and quickly converted it to Black and White.  Now the photo fits the theme in two entirely different ways.

If you look at the original color photo, you can see a man walking in the background and some shadows from some other playground equipment.  I thought these were a little distracting, so I used a few more Photoshop tools to get rid of them.

Well, it definitely fits the theme, but I still have another (3) weeks to come up with something better!

On another note, the black child in this photo was facinated with my camera and kept asking me to take his picture.  He even asked if he could take a few shots with it, which I allowed him to do under very close supervision.  I thought one of the shots I took of him on the swing came out really good.