Mini Portfolio: Hope Cemetery

I've been working over the past couple of weeks putting together the first of what I hope will be a number of mini-portfolios. I decided that the first one would include black and white pictures from our recent trip to Hope Cemetery in Barre, VT.

My goal in putting together a portfolio - if only 10 images - was to bring some focus to my work and avoid what Cole Thompson has referred to as grazing. Like most very simple things, I found this to be surprisingly difficult. I also found it difficult to try to keep it simple; something I seem to learn repeatedly at my day job.

It also brought up the issue of converting my color images to black and white. I've done quite a bit of this over the past couple of years but much of my effort has been put forth combining black and white with color in the same photo to create a new, fun, and somewhat unreal effect.

But of course what I was after here was a much different thing. I did a bit of searching on the web to see what people have to say about converting color images to black and white. What I found was a tremendous number of techniques but very little discussion of the aesthetics of the process. 

So I made it up. Most of these images were converted in Photoshop with some noise reduction (blue sky can cause some real problems!), some channel tweaking and a bit of sharpening.

I've posted these ten images here alongside other images. I'd love constructive feedback; I have a lot to learn!