Photo shoot in Black & White (A.I.)

I love photography in Black & White. Without the distraction of colors, one can truly focus on the composition of a Black & White photo.
One of my favorite elective courses in college was Photography, and all of our assignments were Black & White. We learned how to develop film and make prints. I loved the experience.
Like most hobbies, it’s expensive. Cameras, Dark Room, Chemicals, Enlargers, Photo Print paper. So once the semester ended, my short experience in Black & White photography was over. But 40 years later I still remember how much I enjoyed it.
Enter the recent and rapid development of Artificial Intelligence, and my favorite application of A.I., image generation. I’m surprised that my early experience with this technology has (so far) excluded generating images in Black & White.

Until now.

I’m blessed with many friends and acquaintances, but only one of them seems to have a comparable interest in A.I. Image generation. In fact, it was him posting some of his creations using Midjourney that sparked my interest in exploring the best online resources for making my own A.I. images. This friend only uses Midjourney, but I’m not willing to subscribe, and despite great effort, I haven’t found a way to use Midjourney for free.
This friend recently complained about censorship & sexual bias on Midjourney. He has observed seeing scores of scantily clad girls with visible tits created on this platform, but asking for a guy in a speedo gets a warning that it violates community standards.
Admittedly the images from Midjourney are typically more realistic with higher definition than what I have been able to make with Stable Diffusion models, but I like having the ability to make image content that my friend can’t get from Midjourney!

My friend loves bear-ish, mature, leather men, bearded and stern looking. His latest posts have been in Black and White. They were quite stunning. I was curious what I could coax out of Stable Diffusion models using similar prompts to his, which resulted in this collection: