B&W on a grey day

To be honest, I have been shooting a lot of photos recently...just all of my 8 month old daughter, so it was good to get out with the Black Hawk Church Photo Group and make some images.  (Granted as soon as I got home I took more photos of her, I just can't help myself.)  Our challenge was to create some B&W's on this dreary and slightly rainy day.  I was hoping for more rain actually, the more drastic the weather, the more dramatic the photos.  Oh well, still fun.

The UW Arboretum (where we want to hike) can feel a little messy....visually messy.  There are a lot of branches going all over the place that can cause photos to look very disorganized.  I tried to focus on shape, form, lines, and contrast.  With black and white you need to rely on the shape of your subject (pattern or form too) and not color to know what you are looking at, and having a good black and white point will contain your subject.  Too much of any of these elements and you get to disorganized.  Having too much was easy with so many branches and trees (all the same tone in B&W by the way) going in all different directions.  So I tried to simplify, and look for simple contrast.