The Black & White Challenge has been circling amongst photographers for a while now on Instagram, with the challenge to upload 5 B&W photos for 5 days from fellow users of the application. I find myself in the midst of a love affair with all things Instagram related. Alongside Twitter it has become part of my daily routine to upload an image from my library, along with gaining a dose of inspiration from the people that I follow myself. I love discovering new people to follow and am often blown away by some work that, up until that point, i’d never heard of.Back to the challenge. Honestly, I thought i’d got away from this one. As the weeks rolled by I managed to escape nominations until an Instagram notification popped up on screen yesterday evening. The nomination found its way to me via good friend @atlasfoto (Online Portfolio). Mark and I met whilst he was based in Sun Valley over at the American HQ for Scott Sports. Despite being in the area for skiing, we ventured out onto the springtime trailhead and our friendship was born over an early morning trail run. The rules of this challenge are pretty lax, with no subject taboo or any timeframe to the images. I’ve been dying to go way back into my library for a long time, so i’m going to start this challenge with the image above.Living in japan at the time, I went through a period of devouring everything camera related. I’m not sure the situation now but at the time you could pick up extremely cheap second hand equipment to try out. This shot was captured with a Canon film camera, I forget the exact model (perhaps the EOS 300) during a vacation to South Korea in 2005/6. I’ve always had a bit of a fascination with all things war related, so a trip up to the Korean DMZ was first on my list. Panmunjom is the meeting point of the North and South, with ‘Conference Row’ consisting of a number of buildings where each side can meet whilst remaining in the comfort of their own country. There’s no freedom of movement between these two borders and in this image you can see the North Korean soldier watching on in the distance.The quality of the scan is not so great, but it remains a strong memory, and a nice place to start this 5 day challenge. I’m not sure which direction the next four days will head, but follow me over on Instagram to see how it all pans out.If you don’t like what you see i’ll no doubt be back to posting pictures of mountains next week.Update 02/12: Here’s the remaining 4 images that I uploaded during the challenge. It was a fun week, just as predicted.
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