An InZaiE life: Street Photography in Morocco + Making black and white

A few months ago I finnaly found my SD card from my trip to Morocco two years ago!

So I started making some black and whites of some pictures.

Why?
I noticed I made a lot of street pics. And, well, in Morocco streets are very crowded. Making the pics black and white pulls the attention back to the subject of the photo, the people in it.

Unless the colors are important, for example if I want to track attention to clothing or food, I leave it in colors.

I did this with the excellent free program called Paint.NET. It's a lot like photoshop, wich I used to have, but not anymore unfortunately...
Steps you mainly have to do:
1: Composition! You may need to crop a photo. Or put it back straight. But I wouldn't do this a lot. A photo that isn't straight is actually sometimes better than a straight one in street photography.
To crop: select the whole photo, use the "move selection" tool and hold shift while making the selection smaller to keep the same ratio. move around with selection till you are pleased. Then Image->crop to selection.
To turn: select photo, richt click on corners of selection to turn. Then crop.
2: Sometimes I let paint.NET do "Auto levels" (Adjustments->Auto- levels).This doesn't always turn out great, but it does manage to fix the contrast pretty well.
3: Turn it in black and white! (Adjustments->black and white)
4: Play with the contrast and brightness! (Adjustments-> Brightness/contrast) Don't mess with it a lot though. It just sometimes comes in handy with black and white:)

I start to really love black and white!
I know these pics are not super -WOW- pics, but that is what makes it street photography. These pics make great pics not because of their perfectness, but because they aren't perfect at all. They are a mess. They let you FEEL the streets.
Everybody can do street photography, the only special skills you need to have, is to DARE to take a picture, and that you know when and what to shoot.