A monochrome walk with the Nikon Zf and the Nikkor 40mm f/2

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0100

I think sometimes that familiarity with an area can undermine one’s appreciation of it: I’ve lived in the area I currently live in for seventeen years, around half of my life. I think as well that the fact that one always perceives things with one’s own eyesight leads to things being underappreciated over time: I notice the things I notice, and training myself to see things that usually escape my notice is difficult. Taking away my ability to see in colour is an interesting way to help myself see the familiar in an unfamiliar way, and the black and white mode on a Nikon Zf is a good way to do that. As much as I love the weight and heft of a DSLR, there’s a definite ease in being able to see things “as the sensor sees them” with a mirrorless camera. Walking around streets I have known for over a decade and a half, seeing them in black and white through a viewfinder did help me see things that I don’t usually, especially in terms of textures. As a means of comparison, all images in this post can be dragged left to right to change between showing their colour and their monochrome versions (the colour version was obtained with an unopinionated default development from the raw image data; the black and whites are straight out-of-camera JPEGs): I can only hope kind readers would agree that my preference for these images being monochrome is not just an exercise in me feeling “black and white makes it art.”

Monochrome on backshots.photo

A monochrome walk with the Nikon Zf and the Nikkor 40mm f/2