About

Digital-monochrome was launched around 2004 with over 2.5 million visits, over that time it has won accolades from all over the world as a leading site for monochrome work and also as a learning site for those that want to try the art of digital conversion through the tutorials on this site and from my dedicated monochrome forum The D/M Learning Forum

96% of the images you see on this site are from digital capture, taken in colour, converted to monochrome, edited and printed by myself in my home digital darkroom. All prints are of limited issue of 100 per run, they are printed on Fine art paper using pigmented inks to ensure maximum print stability.

So enjoy looking at the galleries and if you see a picture you like just click the buy button and I will print and post to anywhere in the world.

A short biography

Just thought I would put a face from behind the camera.

Well here goes, I was born in 1952 at a place called Adel Mill Farm in West Yorkshire, here I was brought up with all my family, Mum, Dad, Brother, Sister, Grandad, Aunts and Uncles. A wonderful time of life, from those younger years of living on the farm a greater appreciation of our countryside was learnt.
I now live in a place called Horsforth also in West Yorkshire, I work from home in my digital darkroom and do all processing and printing from there. Anyway that's enough about my personal life so lets get to my photographic roots so to speak.

The Start

My first camera was bought for me when I was 12 years old and was a Kodak 120 roll film, which I still have, it was a bakerlight box camera, fixed lens and leaf shutter but it took large negatives and was a bit hit and miss in quality, but it started my interest in photography, thanks Kodak.

I now shoot with cameras that 20 years ago would have been space technology, an assortment of lens and the obligatory tripod. Going back about 6 years I was working in a wet dark-room producing my work from film and loved every minute of it. My first claim to fame was when I won first prize in the Leeds show and this gave me the inspiration to enter more. I have won various competitions over the years, mainly in BW and had pictures published in nearly every popular photo mag on the market. I first started in BW developing and printing, slowly moving to colour but I was always drawn back to monochrome as the preferred medium, for me it’s simple but effective, dramatic not garish, and for landscape can’t be beaten. Look at the old masters, timeless wonderful photos, the only problem for many who produced work from their home dark-rooms was what to do with all the prints, you can only hang so many on the house walls and I suspect, like me, we have them all put in boxes in cupboards somewhere in our homes. This has all changed now with high speed Internet and the production of images so different now, that leads to

The Digital Era

For me it was a steep learning curve, a real pull from film, dark-room and photo paper, but I gave it a go and now I am completely devoted to digital. I struggled, as many did with BW conversion because over the years I had developed a style of my own which at first I could not reproduce in digital BW, but eventually by reading books, visiting forums etc I have finally got the same look to my Landscapes as what I did in the “old days” plus the added advantage of being able to show not only friends but people all over the world my images, which are no longer collecting dust in a cupboard.

The Website

All the pictures I have taken over the last few years were filling up my hard drive rapidly so as primarily a Landscape photographer I decided to launch this site to show the area around where I live. 90% of the pictures are taken within a 25 mile radius of where I live and I intend to shoot lots more and make this, eventually, one of the biggest mono only landscape web sites in the UK.

Our Landscape

Whilst trekking the hills, dales and moors I have become more aware of the landscape we live in. We don’t own it nor do we dictate to it, nature will do what it has to in the most spectacular ways, I am humbled by its power and beauty, I have witnessed amazing light shows, wondrous cloud formations, nature living in complete harmony equipped to cope with the elements, we as humans feel powerful in this technological age but out there we are just another part of life’s cycle a grain of sand in a vast arena. I try to capture this sense of power and scale in my images not as the camera sees it but my own interpretation through inspiration on being a witness to events I have been privileged to see.

Finally

I hope you enjoy viewing my images, I am still learning conversion techniques in Photoshop, there are sections on this site explaining some of them and I will add more as my knowledge increases. The site is regularly updated with new images, so bookmark it and please re-visit, I would appreciate you signing my Guestbook as feedback really helps.

Martin