This week, Tina Schell takes us on a treasure hunt to find specific items. She notes a list of “treasures” to choose from and even gives us some optional “Extra Credit”. You can read her entire challenge post here. I am not much for “street photography”, but I have focused my lens on a few street performers and I enjoy converting images to black-and-white. To keep the hunt “real”, I am promising to only include images I haven’t shared before (at least not in black-and-white.)

I start with a guitarist who is part of a Mariachi Band performing at an outdoor restaurant on Stone Island near Mazatlan, Mexico. His face shows that he is one with his music, at the moment not playing but he is lost somewhere in the vocal.

Moving north to Seattle, Washington, I find a busker who isn’t just a guitarist. He’s a guitarist with two guitars, one balanced on his chin,  playing all the while as he spins two hula hoops. It doesn’t get any better than this, folks.

OK, so I lied… I did publish this photo last year, but it truly is one of my favorite black and white images. Something about the crisp tonality of the steam engine components of Old 353 speaks to me. It is the only one of this collection that I have shared here on my journey blog before.

My final image is another from Mazatlan. A young man on a horse was riding along the beach at sunset. There was very little in the silhouette to change to monochrome as I exposed for the bright sunlight leaving the pair as a shadow. Simply reducing the saturation left a sepia image to share.

Thanks to Tina for reminding me that the world isn’t always presented in it’s best light in color.  Last week was the anniversary of the birth of Ansel Adams, the undisputed master of black and white landscape photography. I don’t begin to compare these attempts at digital discoloration to be anything close to what he was capable of doing, but his artist’s brush was black and white, and the lack of color has become one of my favorite means of photographic expression. I leave it to you, dear reader, to determine whether or not these images are truly worthy of the term “treasure” as Tina challenged in her post.

John Steiner