A world in black and white: Chicago photographer's stunning images of the city's residents

Daily Mail ^ | 29 November 2017 | Rod Ardehali

[mairdie]

Regularly posting on his Instagram page the Chicago-based photographer Jason M Peterson, who has been taking pictures for the past 25 years daily, constantly pushes his limits within the confines of black and white photography.

'I'lI shoot photos that try and make you feel something,' he told Cover Images.

'Black and white is simply a way I feel makes you focus on the emotion of the photo with less distraction.

[mairdie]

That would be fantastic!! Dashing through the snow, in a one horse open sleigh!

I love old photographs. They connect us so strongly to the past and to one another. Every one of us had ancestors whose locomotion was only a single HP. Those are the things it’s fun to remember.

[Nuocmam]

Some of the best pictures I have ever seen are the black and whites taken by Ansel Adams!

[11Bush]

Me too! I had a darkroom in every place I lived from 1973 through 2001. The smell of stop bath, fixer, and other chems still lingers in my memory.

Damn digital. No artistic talent needed. Just put it into Photoshop and manipulate till you have something decent. No hand dodging, burning, toning, or talent needed.

[mairdie]

Oh, do please post some pictures you took and developed. That would be so exciting to see.

The only smell like that that I can remember is gun cleaning fluid. That’s a smell that stays with you, too.

[Irish Eyes]

I love black and white photography. It shows emotion like no other.

[mairdie]

Agreed. One of the greats.

[mairdie]

If you don't have one of your own to show, why not google images and find one to show us that shows off the qualities you love best?

Google B/W Photo Images

[Irish Eyes]

I would but I can not remember how to post pictures.

[crosdaddy]

Vivian’s work absolutely rocks, it’s too bad she lived such a mundane, reserved life, never to know her own success as an artist.

[mairdie]

Left angle bracket IMG SRC=”url of picture” width=600 right angle bracket

Or any width that’s sensible. Daily Mail images appear in sevceral sizes. The smaller full width ones are 634.

The problem with HTML is that if you try to write it to show it off, the page DOES IT!

[McGavin999]

Agree

[AZLiberty]

White Pixels Matter.

[JimRed]

The problem with HTML is that if you try to write it to show it off, the page DOES IT!

I frequently use a < /sarc > tag. If you put a space after and before the two angle brackets it will read correctly without changing anything.

< IMG SRC=”url of picture” width=600 >, and instruct no spaces.

[mairdie]

What a wonderful trick! I would have saved much effort if I’d known this when I was teaching HTML to a number of people through emails. Thank you.

[wally_bert]

My darkroom experience was a photography class in93.

I learned a lot.

It was fun making contact aheets and doing manual manipulation.

[JimRed]

You’re very welcome! BTW, are the quotation marks around url of picture part of the entry, or have you used them to set it apart for demo purposes?

[mairdie]

Quotation marks around the url is standard HTML format. Leave off one of the quotation marks and you won't see the image. That's for me. That's how I build a reply on FR that includes images.

It's normal HTML usage. I write in bare HTML. I never use a wysiwyg editor. What that means is that my webpages are readable. So you can take any page of my website and look at the underlying HTML and see how the lines are structured.

So, for example, I have a page of art links to Daily Mail articles. Each line gives the a href that is the link, and embedded in the middle are the words that say what the link IS on the webpage. In this case, it's an icon.

So in the middle of an a href, you'll always find an img src.

I see the html for one of my pages by clicking Alt-U on a page, but I use Firefox. I don't know what you do in your browser to see the underlying HTML, but see what options you get when you right click on one of my pages. One of mine is View Page Source.

Here's a page that's even better. It's one single image on a white page showing Santa on an old fashioned phone.

Santa on phone

Do a View Page Source equivalent on that page!

I have a bunch of small pages that I built to teach HTML to people, but I'd have to search for them.

I started my website back in 1993, and these pages still use that old, old-fashioned HTML. I had to get current when I did the e-books, but current is just not as readable as the old way of doing it. My personal website is about 15,000 pages and the same in the Henry Livingston website, so I do this a lot. I'm ALWAYS willing to help, so please feel free if there's anything I can do for you.

[wally_bert]

Whatever remains of any 90s B&W is somewhere in storage.

I don’t toss photos unless they are poor quality.

From what I remember, people liked most of what I did.

[mairdie]

Having seen the quality of your videos, I don’t doubt your photos are of the same high quality! If they ever get unearthed, would love to see some.

What do you think of the school of art that tries to be as realistic as photos?

[wally_bert]

As the unpacking battle goes on, no telling what will turn up.

I found part of my autograph collection in a folder of a drawer I mass emptied.

One of them was the first autograph I ever got. It was Mills Watson from Sheriff Lobo. An underrated show to me.

I got two that night. The other was a G-rated one of a playboy bunny right beside him. I was maybe 9 at the time and didn’t think much of it. It’s probably buried with the rest of the collection.

Thank you for the kind words.