When I closed my old digital download store a few years ago, I stopped selling most of my Lightroom presets. I figured that the market for these was pretty much saturated and that there wasn’t really any point. However, recently I’ve been receiving some requests for some of my older packs, and after using m T-Pan set on the most recent episode of Street Photo Diary, I’ve decided to make T-Pan available again.

I’ve recently been going over some old photographs and trying out some new treatments on them. A few years ago, while on a trip to Germany, we were staying on the outskirts of Darmstadt, and right near where our hotel was located, was a fairly large forest. I had taken lots of photos there at the time but I was never really happy with them.

As part of my ongoing Fuji Jpeg book project (which is progressing - but still a little bit away) I recently set about working on some recipes for getting various looks. One of the main things I wanted to try, was to see if I could get something similar to “street pan” in look. This is a type of film that gives you high contrast black and white and is a popular “look” with photographers who shoot street photography on film.

A little while ago I got up early in the morning and headed to a little fishing town just north of Dublin to get some morning shots of the sleepy port coming to life. I had originally hoped that it would be a nice bright morning, and that I would capture the early rays of the sun over the sea and the harbour, but instead a thick cloud was down, and it was beginning to rain. 

I currently have three sets of black and white presets available for Lightroom and based on popular request, I’m now making them available as a single bundle. The three sets of presets are: Monolith, MonoLux and T-Pan. Each has a different style and different approach to creating the black and white look, and together I think they make a good range of styles for creating black and white images in Lightroom.

In the first part of this series, I posted some of the images that I had recently taken using colour film. I had left some black and white rolls in to be developed too, but they take a bit longer, so I couldn’t share the photos at the time. Well, they’re finally back, so read on for the results of the rest of the experiment.

I'm not a huge black and white shooter. Don't get me wrong, I like black and white, but I rarely set out with the notion of shooting exclusively in the format. I used to in the past, but I haven't done it in ages, so when I was in the city centre here in Dublin the other day, I decided to try shooting some black and white images with my new(ish) Sony A6000.