Gallery: hello darkness

Hello darkness, my old friend

I’ve come to talk with you again

…

In restless dreams, I walked alone

Narrow streets of cobblestone

‘Neath the halo of a street lamp

I turned my collar to the cold and damp
The Sound of Silence, Paul Simon

Even the most mundane scenes by day are transformed at night. Ordinary streets become mysterious, shadows conceal the mundane and allow our imaginations to fill the hidden spaces. And, captured in monochrome, they often have more than a touch of the film noir about them.

Ritva is hosting the Monochrome Madness challenge this week and she asks us ‘to demonstrate how shadows, highlights, and delicate light sources can elevate an everyday moment into something dramatic and memorable’.

As I’m just back from our three week trip to the Caucasus region and wading through a virtual mountain of photos taken there, I’m keeping it simple with a selection of (mostly) night photos from the last few years that I think will convert successfully to monochrome and show the sort of atmosphere Ritva is challenging us to create. I also have just a few examples of low light photography away from night streets, a couple in churches and one from nature. And I even managed to include two hastily sourced from that Caucasus mountain!

As always I used my go-to software, Nik Silver Efex, to convert all these shots from colour originals. The ‘wet rocks’ filter provided a good starting point for the effect I was trying to achieve although I also fiddled with the contrast and other settings. My feature photo is of the Canal Grande in Trieste.