Washington Monument

I thought of my night in Washington, D.C., last summer when I saw that the theme for this week’s photo challenge is Illumination.

I didn’t spend much time editing my photos after this trip into town, so this morning I looked  through them again. After playing with this one in Lightroom while in color, I actually found I liked it more after switching it over to black-and-white.

I think because I shot exclusively in black-and-white for more than a decade during the film years, I have a bit of an aversion to it now. I was so starved for color and sick of smelling chemicals that after my magazine made the switch, I never looked back. I reveled in the opportunity to use Fuji Velvia and Kodakchrome for the rich and vibrant colors they produced, and it was nice to have a lab develop our slides and prints for a change.

In this digital age, with so many wonderful editing tools and filters available, it’s easy to get caught up in the complexity of it all and forget to step back once in a while to the good old days… but I’ll definitely skip returning to that claustrophobic darkroom.