Ayup! Over the last month, I’ve been shooting with a new project in mind: Monochrome Mindfulness. Quiet, calm and contemplative scenes from everyday life. Additionally, it will include images from my photo trips that otherwise wouldn’t have been published.
The textures, the less impactful compositions, the abstract and the artistic. It’s a completely different form of expression when compared with my Kaleidoscopic series. In fact, they’re polar opposites.
Opening my eyes (and mind)
This series is all about ditching any preconceived ideas about the subjects I want to capture. At its core, it’s an exercise in noticing. This, to me, feels quite freeing.
One example, a visually boring lounge room in a Tenerife (Tenerifish/Tenerifian?) hotel recently. Nothing exciting or worthwhile to photograph. Except then the creative, distorted view through the blinds caught my eye. A beautiful scene, waiting patiently to enter an onlooker’s awareness.
The monochrome photography set-up
About a month ago, I reintroduced iPhone photography into the mix. Really pleased I did. It’s allowed me to start capturing wider angles, as well as anything I notice while I’m out and about without my main camera.
I always shoot JPG, and love having most of the final look set up in-camera. Well, in-phone in this case. The Stark B&W photo style on the iPhone is serving this project extremely well.
The same goes for my actual camera. I’ve got a beautiful, rich, high-contrast look dialled in. This simply uses Sony’s BW (black and white) creative look with ramped-up contrast and shadows. Nice!
While I’ll still edit every photo, the above settings free up any spare concentration. This can then be spent observing and absorbing your surroundings. Furthermore, it’s really useful to instantly see roughly how the final image will look.
Quiet, calm and contemplative
This series isn’t about impact, as such. It’s about quiet moments. Individually, they might not always be as interesting as my modern architecture shots.
What I’m working towards is a collection of mindful scenes. Some may have gone unnoticed, others may be more obvious. What unites each image, however, is a pause. I think we can all agree that taking a minute, or two, or five is becoming a lost art form.
I’ve been sharing images from the Monochrome Mindfulness series over on Mastodon and Bluesky. Despite them probably not being hugely popular, I’ve also started uploading some to my Unsplash portfolio.