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Prior to going all digital I shot exclusively in black & white and was reminded of this by several people recently. So when I went to Sissinghurst Castle Garden I decided to go back to my old ways and see what I could come up with.

After such a long hiatus away from black & white I found it harder than I thought it would. Shooting in black & white involves a different approach as you look more for light, line and form in a composition. It’s certainly not a case of just turning a colour image into greyscale with your favourite image application such as Photoshop as some images that look good in colour may look completely flat when converted. Apple’s Aperture, and I pressume Adobe’s Lightroom, makes things a little easier by having monochrome presets for standard or filtered images.

Part of the joys and aches though is that you can, and inevitably will, fine tune the conversion settings. I ended up flaffing about with this for quite a while and became aware, again, of colour to tonal conversion. I used to be able to judge this visually in my head to a certain degree when taking a shot. Not anymore it would seem, but luckily Aperture was able to get me “out of jail” for the most part. I plan to do more black & white though as I’ve always preferred to do as much as possible in-camera and not spend so much time sitting in front of a computer mucking about with correcting images.

Anyhoo, I’ve digressed enough from the title of this album. Sissinghurst Castle Garden in Kent is an Elizabethan mansion with celebrated gardens designed by writer Vita Sackville-West and her husband Sir Harold Nicolson. It is conserved and manged by The National Trust and you can find out more information from their website.