This is hardly a story of a passionate romance with the greyscale wonderland known as black and white photography. Instead, this is a seven-in-the-morning daydream about the “what if?” involved with converting an entire body of work from its original colour-rich glory, to the flat monochrome world of yesterday.
Several hours later on a nice summer day, a name, a domain, and an initial design were respectively thought up, purchased, and created. However, this was only the beginning — the amount of work involved with sorting through over 8,000 photos taken from 2004-2007, choosing from the best, including many that had never left the negative, then creatively converting them to black & white was no minor mission. Fast forward through six or so hours and the work from June 2004 to October 2004 had been somewhat sorted through. Yet, instead of a grueling Saturday project, it became a rediscovery of past work, and in turn, the rebirth of forgotten frames in an entirely new form.
Beyond the photography, the basis for the design was a minimal concept, relying on just enough tone and typography to frame the work. For typography, the site employs Klavika (Light & Regular) and Lucida Grande (deprecated to Segoe UI or Lucida Sans Unicode). The backend is using a photo management system that not only keeps track of everything via a database, but it also generates the necessary XML feed needed for the gallery.
For easy browsing, use your keyboard arrows to navigate photos and press the G key to go back and forth from the listing of albums.
Hopefully this gave you some insight into everything you could possibly want to know about this project, but just in case you need to know more, feel free to email hello[at]aworldinblackandwhite.com. The project is also now on Myspace (myspace.com/aworldinblackandwhite), so come say "hi!" to us on there as well.