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A Walk on Powell Butte

Walking on Powell Butte often brings me into a black and white state-of-mind. That’s what happened when I wrote a post about a photo walk there in December.

Last weekend I found myself there again. This time I constrained myself to “black and white photos with the iPhone using Obscura, mostly with the new 4x lens”. I find contraints to be helpful for creativity.

Obscura has become my go-to app for a manual UI for iPhone photography. Like any sophiticated interface with a purpose, it takes some getting used to, but that’s worth it. I thought I would make edits in post-processing, but in the end I didn’t touch the files at all, except one crop.

A black and white image of an orchard with trees in a grassy field. Two people are walking among the trees, and a narrow path winds through the scene. The sky is partly cloudy.

A black and white image of a wide, grassy field with a lone person walking a dog on a curved path. In the background, there is a line of tall conifer trees and distant hills under a cloudy sky.

A person sits under a tree in a grassy field. They are being held by the arm of a second person who is not visible due to the tree trunk. There are a couple other trees in a row nearby. The image is in black and white.

A grayscale landscape showing a mostly trees with a few scattered buildings and structures and hills in the background. Thick clouds fill the sky, and an airplane is visible at the center.

Black and white image of wild plants in the foreground, with a hilly landscape and cloudy sky in the background.

Grayscale image of a grassy field with a few small trees, bordered by a line of taller coniferous trees under a cloudy sky.

I’m pretty happy with how this experience turned out, and look forward to similar explorations with Obscura in the future.