Black and White Challenge Day 1

About a week ago, Robin over at Breezes at Dawn, kindly invited me to participate in the Black and White Photo Challenge. As I’m sure my regular readers know, I find black and white photography difficult because, for me, photography is so very much about the color. This is part of the reason I accepted Robin’s invitation, because it would be a true challenge for me. The “rules” of the challenge are quite simple:

1.On 5 consecutive days, create a post using either a past or recent photo in black and white.
2.Each day invite another blogging friend to join in the fun.

As I’ve often been known to do when it comes to blogging challenges or photo assignments, I like to find a way to make them my own. In a couple of Robin’s posts for this challenge she used a technique that selectively colors one small area of a black and white photo. Robin explained to me this technique is actually called “focal black and white”. It is something I’ve been meaning to try for a while now, and as it often the case, just never got around to it. I had a feeling in a cool editing program like Lightroom, there had to be a way to do it. I searched, I discovered, I tried!

So, for my black and white challenge, it will actually be a “focal black and white” challenge. I’ve chosen 5 photos to present in black and white with a pop of color somewhere in the shot for emphasis and fun. I will post one photo each day this week, Monday through Friday, starting today.
As far as inviting blogging friends, just as Robin did, I am inviting anyone who would like to join in to please do so! Maybe even make yours a “focal black and white” challenge if you’re interested in giving it a try.

Here is my first photo that I tried this technique on:

This is my daughter Meghan and her ballroom partner Brandon at a ballroom competition that I attended (and took LOTS of photos of and fully intended to blog about, but have yet to do so, **sigh**) last weekend. I thought the intense look on Meghan’s face with just the red lips was a good place to give this technique a try.