Started off with a stop at Starbucks - not something I do on a regular basis so it’s still considered a treat.

Then off to the Denver Botanic Gardens for a 4 hour seminar on BW photography given by Scott Dressel- Martin a wonderful lecturer and a professional photographer. The talk was about how to be creative with Black and White photography. Given that I’m gonna be teaching a similar class in 5 weeks I thought it would be helpful to see what his approach was all about.

We started out by looking at a wonderful Ansel Adams exhibit showcasing his early works - before 1938 and contrasting it with the images we know of as his primary or productive phase of his career. There is a wonderful book recently published called Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams by Rebecca Senf which goes into depth about this initial phase. The reason his photography changed for the better was multifactorial : His development of the Zone System, better film and paper and his move away from pictorialism.

We then had the chance to go out into the gardens to take pictures for little over an hour. I wasn’t really looking to find things that could be taken into BW but rather looking for pics that I thought would be interesting. I , of course, didn’t get the memo saying to bring your camera. DUH? But I had my iPhone 14 and that’s as good as many DSLRs so I didn’t feel cheated.