Here we are in week 9 of following the projects in the book 52 Assignments: Street Photography by Brian Lloyd Duckett.

I’ve skipped a week here in terms of following the book, because that assignment had a longer time scale… now that we are making progress through the book, I’m discovering a few more like that, where the brief is to investigate a theme over a month (or longer!)… so those assignments might go on the back burner and then emerge fully formed after some time has elapsed!

Meanwhile, with an hour to spare, Sharon and I took a quick trip to Fitzroy to explore a more focused assignment, this one titled ‘No Shades of Grey’. The challenge here was to produce six images that were extremely high contrast, playing with large amounts of black and white within the frame to produce interesting shapes, angles, and contrasts between different elements. I took my trusty Ricoh GR for this assignment, as it has such a fantastic high contrast black and white mode that I rarely need to go beyond the jpegs into the raw files. As luck would have it, I ended up with exactly six images that I felt reflected the theme, with the last taken just as we were heading back to the car.

I hadn’t been feeling all that well this weekend, a combination of work stress, fatigue, and the usual post-treatment issues, but this was a great example of the fact that sometimes it’s good to push yourself to create, even if just for a short amount of time – I find there’s no better ‘cure’ for stress and physical issues than putting on the ‘creativity’ hat and seeing what flows.

Probably not my strongest set of images, but it felt like something of an accomplishment nonetheless.