Why did I take these photos? Why are they in black and white?

Traveling is interesting. For the first few days in a city everything looks new and different. Everything seems worth a shutter click or two. After you've walked the city for a few days you start separating the subjects that have become routine from subjects that are resistant to inspiring boredom or nonchalance. 

If I come back to a building again and again it tells me that there is something I'd like to explore visually. In Montreal there are a number of buildings in downtown and in the Old Town that bring me back early in the morning, late at night or whenever the sun is in the process of surrounding puffy, white clouds with jewel-like blue sky. But for me the way I most like to see buildings is in black and white. It's part of the process of distilling down the building into pure design or pure existence. And making images in black and white means that the subjects don't depend on the seduction of colors to make their points.

I love to see buildings with big, classical columns. They seem so permanent and regal. So unlike the glass towers that get thrown up all over my home town. I love that certain buildings in other cities are artfully spotlit at night while our glass covered, stolid cube buildings here mostly sit in darkness. 

And, most of all I like images where majestic buildings are conjoined with humans; pedestrians. Something so different from Texas towns that seem to be populated, in the public spaces, only by cars.

When I was in Montreal the temperatures in the evening and overnight drifted down into the lower 40s (Fahrenheit). I love walking with no fixed agenda. Just a vague chill on my cheeks and the exciting freshness of chilled breath. A camera slung over one shoulder. Stopping to look up at an interesting construction. Pulling the camera up to my eye and trying to figure out just how to expose a photograph that I know can't contain both detail in the deep shadows or detail in bright highlights at the same time. Where is the sweet spot? For me, it's nearly always about maintaining at least a bit of visual detail in the highlights. Letting burning light fixtures slip over into pure white. Letting shadows own the inky blacks. 

Then putting the camera on its strap back over my left shoulder and walking on to see what else there is to see. 

When I look at the more graphic building images; those taken far after sunset I love the combination of tones which I don't ever see during the daylight hours. Then, after a few hours of walking, I head back to the hotel, have a glass of wine in the lobby bar and then head up to bed. 

I take the photos because they both remind me of times before I ever thought to have a camera, but they also remind me of the pleasures of looking intently and with a certain modicum of joy, at buildings from another age. 

The kind of camera is immaterial. It's the process that's most valuable. Not the final result.