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"He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake." - Psalms 23:3

October challenge

Vespa
Hello all. As you know, I’ve become a crazy photographer. I’m dragging my dSLR around with me everywhere. If they’d let me take it into the jail, I would. As I progress, there are areas of photography that used to be foreign to me that I’m not playing around with. I would have never been interested in wide-angle architectural photography just a few months ago. Now I’m planning a while business plan around it.

Another area that is new is Black & White photography. I’ve known that every photography student starts there, shooting in B&W like crazy. I have messed around a little, with my infrared shots, but that’s kinda specialized.

So, I’ve decided to shoot only B&W photography for the month of October. I’ll exclude any professional shoots, but all of my photowalking and personal shooting will be B&W. Because I want control over the output, I’ll shoot normal, but convert all in Photoshop. I like to use the Channels tools to get the best look.

Why not join me? You don’t have to shoot B&W, but maybe there’s a genre of photography that interests you, something new, why not give it a try? I think limiting yourself can actually unlock creativity that you’ve never had before.

One Among The Many Fly Boy Link You Said You'd Stay The Hand That Feeds

12 Comments

  1. I thought that bicycle chain looked familiar. :-)

  2. Kevin Devin says:

    Hey Trevor!

    That sounds like fun… I’ll join ya. I too will maintain control and convert in LightRoom. I enjoy little challenges / themes like this.

    -KHD

  3. Brian Auer says:

    Great stuff Trevor — awesome example of applying yourself in a focus area. I’ll join your challenge, but I’m going to continue my exploration of minimalism. I wasn’t planning on spending an entire month going after it, but hey… why not?

    Why not conduct a project around this? See if you can get people to commit to a topic, and at the end of October you could gather up everybody’s links to their “October Challenge” galleries on Zooomr or Flickr.

  4. Brian Auer says:

    Almost forgot, here’s an article to keep you busy with black & white conversions.

  5. trevor says:

    Brian,
    Thanks for the B&W link. Also, thanks for your ideas. I just may turn this into a project. The only problem is that the last couple of times I tried contest/projects, no one participated. So I’m a little gunshy.

    We’ll see.

    Kevin,
    Thanks. I look forward to our outcome. I’ll tag all of mine with “OctoberChallenge”

  6. [...] Trevor Carpenter is taking this concept to a higher level, and he’s called it the “October Challenge“. Trevor is going to focus on black & white photos for the entire month of October as a [...]

  7. [...] October Challenge: Shoot in Black & White: Trevor Carpeter has suggested that we spend October getting our B&W skills honed. He is going to take all his shots over the following month in B&W, and suggests we do the same. I’m going to join in too, posting my shots to Zooomr. [TrevorCarpenter.com] [...]

  8. Ian Crane says:

    this is a great idea. i have needed to do some b&w projects for awhile, i’m completely inexperienced in it.

    i think i’m going to join you in only turning out b&w during the month of october!

  9. [...] at the end of September, I started writing a post telling you all that I wanted to shoot more black & white photography. While writing that post, [...]

  10. [...] October Challenge was so successful for me personally, and for the handful that participated, that I decided I want [...]

  11. [...] all working hard on the 2008 Challenge, shooting your communities each week, but this is different. Last October we chose to shoot black & white all month, challenging ourselves to grow and understand the [...]

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