Black and White Street Photography in Tokyo

The cherry blossom season has come to an end and, to be honest, I am exhausted. For about two weeks I have been out shooting every decent-weather day, trying to make the city look its best, while also trying not to neglect my class, my volunteering, my friends and family, housework, exercise and physiotherapy,... And I am not even sure it was worth it. I got one shot that I really love, and I will go through all of my pictures and make a post about them later, I promise. Still, I needed a break. It happened before that I burned myself out and put my camera away for month, and I didn’t want that to happen again.
So instead of making myself go through and edit all of my cherry blossom season shots right away, as I might have done in the past, I decided to just do something for fun.

I got the idea through Peter, my husband. For the second time now he set his camera to black and white to learn and think more about contrast, opposed to color.
While I don’t like the idea of switching my camera to black and white for everything I shoot, I found that it might be fun and interesting to see the world this way for a little while. So, I set my camera to black and white, chose my olympus zuiko 17mm f1.8 to be my only lens for the day, and went outside to do some street photography.

It took me a few shots to get used to it, but after a little while I started to see things differently, to notice places and subjects that would look good in this fashion.
On a 2.5 hour walk to Kagurazaka-Dori I ended up taking over 700 pictures. Of course not every single shot’s a big success, but there are a lot of pictures that I personally really like.

On the weekend Peter and I went on a walk to Shin-Okubo, Koreatown. Since with the 17mm I often felt it was too wide and ended up cropping quite a bit, I wanted to try my olympus zuiko 45mm f1.8 this time.
In company, and with a headache, I didn’t take as many pictures as the first time. But there are still a few that I like a lot.

The 45mm actually were a bit to long in many situations. I guess it is time to add the olympus zuiko 25mm f1.8 to my gear collection.

In conclusion, it is really fun to try something different sometimes, especially something that might take you out of your comfort zone, like shooting pictures of strangers on the street.
Having no expectations also tends to make me feel happier with my results, and I really needed that.