Black and White Photography is how photography began and continues to be a strong creative choice of expression for many photographers. The explosion of digital darkroom technologies like Lightroom, Photoshop and Aperture, and basically any image editing software, have made black and white photography accessible to everyone. Before going digital (2004) I flirted for a time with black and white slide (transparency) film called Agfa Scala. Before images could be converted to black and white with the click of a button, I had this idea of creating nearly identical, but separately exposed images, one on color film and one on black and white Scala film. My goal was to have a set of images with precisely matching pairs of slides, one in color and one in black and white. Then at my gallery exhibitions I wanted to have a pair of synchronized slide projectors showing each pair in sequence, first the black and white image, with all the beautiful tone and texture and then slowly fading in the color one over the top. Of course now with digital images so common place and the ability to digitally fade an image from color to back and white so simple I am not sure if I will ever go to the trouble of setting up such a slideshow.

Anyway, in February 2000 I ventured to Patagonia and Antarctica, with two cameras, one loaded with (probably) Fuji Provia and the other with Agfa Scala, I proceeded to carefully take virtually identical images using a tripod, two identical cameras and lenses. I would take a color image and then as quickly as possible swap cameras paying particular attention so as to keep the image alignment exactly as it was. Even after processing I took special care to align the resulting slides in their slide mounts.

Here are some of the Agfa Scala images I took in Patagonia and Antarctica… These are not digital conversion in Photoshop, these are scans of black and white positive slide film.