Do you only make / view B&W photos?

I seem to be drawn mainly to B&W or really vibrant colour of Velvia. Not sure why but it seems to be either or for me. Raw+JPG set to B&W in my M9, Tri-X in my Rolleicord and Velvia 100 in my Xpan and that is what was in my bag heading to work this morning. If I could only choose one though it would be B&W.
 
I should note that I hate desaturating. There are so many better techniques for converting color to B&W.
jsrockit said:
For some... but you've seen my work and I don't desaturate (which seems to be in style these days). That said, that doesn't mean work's not mundane. ;)
Click to expand...
I definitely agree that your work is very interesting, but it looks like you seek out colors.

If the colors aren't working for you B&W totally wins.
 
Lord Nikon said:
I definitely agree that your work is very interesting, but it looks like you seek out colors.
Click to expand...

Well, I generally photograph in color so I guess certain things pop out when I'm photographing because of color... but I can see in B&W as well. I'm just not as interested for my work. :)

colors aren't working for you B&W totally wins.
Click to expand...

Well, I'd say good photographs win regardless of medium. :p
 
I love color, have since childhood when the best thing in the world was a box of 64 crayons, with wild names and exotic hues. I also loved the trouble it got me into, back in the late 50s, when my teacher told my parents I was being deliberately defiant by coloring the sky purple and the grass brown.

None-the-less, I wasn't deterred - I paint, and deliberately use a saturated palate dominated by juxtaposing saturated primaries with deep earth tones, like burnt orange and thallo blue (green tone). Color film always vexed me, and I burnt out girlfriend after girlfriend by asking them to help me color balance my Ciba prints. But digital color is my salvation as long as I don't need to print it!

I got tired of hearing, over and over, the skin tones are too red, the skin is too yellow, she looks a bit magenta... Geez! Didn't any of them ever hear of artistic license? So now when I print, I print in good old black and white silver emulsion. And then attack it with a variety of heavy metals to make my own color scheme. Iron blue, uranium red, vanadium yellow, ferrovanadate green! And as a bonus, most of it is radioactive! Crit that Mrs. Strubel! (2nd grade teacher who didn't like my crayon choices.)

Paulfish, I'm down with ya, but I never claim a disability. I tell folks I'm a deuteranope, which they interpret either as something catching or a religion, and then leave me alone.
 
jsrockit said:
... Why the self-imposed exile from color photography?
Click to expand...

Ok, I had a bit of fun with you "color-sighted' folks in the last post, but I should probably answer the direct question since I DO have an opinion on this. Yes, I prefer looking at black and white photography. Not that I distain color photography, I have seen some very fine color photographs, but they are rare in my world. The majority of color pictures I see are mundane - they look just like the thing they are a picture of. And I wonder, "Why was this made into a picture?" The thing itself looks just like this if I close one eye and look at it from only one angle, and put a border around a rectangular portion of it.

On the other hand, a black and white photograph looks like something completely different, the tonality is usually overly exaggerated, the shapes are emphasized and the very nature of the thing I'm looking at is grainy and ... well different! The photograph has transcended reality. When color photos do that I like them too. But for the most part I find that quality to be present in black and white photographs more often than I do in color photos.

And that is the main reason I look at photographs or visual representation of any kind (paintings, drawings, tv shows , etc.) - to see something different than if I merely look around.
 
i shoot mainly in b&w because:

it is going away.

people with digital cameras do not shoot in B&W,
instead they are taught to shoot in color and then adjust
to B&W in PP. Shooting in B&W means concentrating on
composition, light & shadows and texture.

i think william eggleston help changed people's perception that
color was for snaps while b&W was for fine art. But today,
i see do not see alot of fine art with color, instead i see iphone
instagram as attempts. Maybe it's hard to replicate eggleston ?

raytoei
 
Chris101 said:
The majority of color pictures I see are mundane - they look just like the thing they are a picture of. And I wonder, "Why was this made into a picture?" The thing itself looks just like this if I close one eye and look at it from only one angle, and put a border around a rectangular portion of it.

On the other hand, a black and white photograph looks like something completely different, the tonality is usually overly exaggerated, the shapes are emphasized and the very nature of the thing I'm looking at is grainy and ... well different! The photograph has transcended reality.
Click to expand...

So, you get tricked by black and white's abstraction of an image? ;)

In all seriousness, I have to ask though: What is wrong with an image looking like what it really is? I photograph with other photographers a lot and we sometimes make photos of the same subject. They never look the same ever! Part of photography is putting a frame around something in order to direct someone's attention towards something they may have ignored... or intentionally leaving information outside the frame that makes the image inside the frame different than what is actually there.

I think many people think color photography is easy. I hear so many times that color photography is only about the color. NO, color photography is about content just like any other type of photography... it just adds another descriptive element to the mix.
 
[email protected] said:
people with digital cameras do not shoot in B&W,
instead they are taught to shoot in color and then adjust
to B&W in PP. Shooting in B&W means concentrating on
composition, light & shadows and texture.
Click to expand...

This is not quite true for everyone. I shoot RAW and I can definetely tell while I'm shooting if the photo will be B&W or color. Don't underestimate people based on a camera / medium choice. There is a lot of BS on this site about digital photographers. It's all just photography.

i think william eggleston help changed people's perception that
color was for snaps while b&W was for fine art. But today,
i see do not see alot of fine art with color, instead i see iphone
instagram as attempts. Maybe it's hard to replicate eggleston ?
Click to expand...

Well, Eggleston among many others. If you are not seeing a lot of color photography today, you are not looking very hard...it's all over the art world. I think we need to make a disctinction between people who are serious and doing it well and people who are not serious. It is hard to replicate an Eggleston, despite what people here think. He's a very polarizing photographer whose images have very subtle elements that make them work. These subtle elements are lost on many. That said, if they don't do it for you, then that's cool.
 
Since I am a Visual Junkie
I View it ALL ...Digital, Film, Color, B&W

Personally I mostly shoot 35mm B&W 99.9% of the Time
but that may Change

Recently I Fell Smitten for Martin Hinze's work
here on RFf and on Flickr
Martin using his collapsible cron & Porta 160...Stellar Rendering, Loved the Muted Colour & Painterly Soft Palatte
so I will Give Porta Color A Go This Summer -
Thanks Martin for the Inspiration :) !
 
How can the decision, color or B&W, be made without regard to subject matter? The images that interest me most are those that are somewhat edgy or gritty. Pretty pictures of landscapes, animals, cute children hold no allure. Reproducing reality in all its colorful glory is not my goal. So, it's B&W exclusively for me.

I'm similarly prejudiced in viewing photographs. I do look at some color images, especially those that have a hard edge. But most of my viewing is B&W, often with the goal of improving my own technique.

Harry
 
hlockwood said:
How can the decision, color or B&W, be made without regard to subject matter?
Click to expand...

It's very easy... there are great color and great B&W photos everywhere and they run the gamut in subject matter / content.

I guess my point is that if someone is into Photography, they should be able to view things that are different from what they do personally.
 
jsrockit said:
It's very easy... there are great color and great B&W photos everywhere and they run the gamut in subject matter / content.

I guess my point is that if someone is into Photography, they should be able to view things that are different from what they do personally.
Click to expand...

Well, as generalities go, I suppose you're correct. But I am, indeed, into photogaphy, and for me photography is personal. This means I have a built-in bias toward B&W, notwithstanding that "there are great color photos...everywhere...".

Harry
 
I prefer colour, for sure, but really wanted to learn the "basics" (lol) so I went with B&W. Being able to do it all at home was the main reason. Four years a go I thought B&W was pretentious! I was wrong about that. Working with colour film, for me, is too tedious: more expensive, getting it developed, yadda yadda. Digital beckons but I really like older cameras. If the new stuff from Fuji was a bit cheaper I might be all digital. Maybe.
 
I remember reading some odd - almost agressive comments in the visitors book at an exhibition of quite large, mostly brilliant colour prints at the Photographers Gallery in London. This was in the early 80's and most were saying they weren't 'proper' serious art because they weren't monochrome, they considered them 'snapshots'. They weren't of miserable war torn scenes either, just the real world in all it's lovely colourful glory. I was very much a colour person then and until quite recently - transparency film was so good. I like to view all photographs, I'm not bothered about whether they're old, new mono or colour. You don't just watch B&W movies do you?

Now I've turned to digital, because I can't afford the cost of colour film dev & print etc. Also, all my fave films went out of production, especially Kodachrome 25/64!
Nowadays I enjoy the convenience of digital, I also enjoy the steep learning curve that I'm faced with when trying make turn a reasonable digital file into a decent monochrome one. I prefer to work with a monochrome image, and pick photos to work on that particularly suit, usually it's when colour doesn't add to the image on various levels. But I don't think it's ever automatically 'better'.

There's a recent thread which largely lambasts types of heavy handed manipulation of images, which I would agree can look ugly or rather pointless. Digital makes it possible to do anything to an image at the touch of a mouse / button / pen etc. It can be too much freedom, then the tail wags the dog. The technology takes over and the simple image becomes a messy 'digital' one, mono or colour. Sorry, I'm off the point. I hope I'm making sense?
Digital is really a fairly new technology - to me anyway (and most of us) and I'm still learning. I try to make my super sharp and clean digital images look good, and the old film images, mostly monochrome, are still my preferred bench mark.

I bought a secondhand Robert Frank book recently, all mono of course, amazing pics of Paris from late 40s. It's not a very helpful thought but you can't help wonder if it would have been a better book if printed in colour. Pointless I know, it's the interesting content that is the key, the lack of colour is irrelevant, few would be actually better - surely? Of course, he didn't have the choice we mostly have.

I can't help but wonder, off thread again, if that cameras of today are perhaps too good, where's the possibility of the brilliant accident? Modern cameras default settings make endless super sharp well exposed, grainless pictures that lack the character I used to cherish.

Will I buy the M9 mono that will be announced tomorrow? Maybe.
 
Last edited:
mrrobleyleica said:
I remember reading some odd - almost agressive comments in the visitors book at an exhibition of quite large, mostly brilliant colour prints at the Photographers Gallery in London. This was in the early 80's and most were saying they weren't 'proper' serious art because they weren't monochrome, they considered them 'snapshots'.
Click to expand...

That's pretty funny. I remember viewing a Fay Godwin exhibition at the same gallery in 1980 and in that very same visitors' book there was page after page of tedious comments to the effect that her photographs were just pale imitations of Ansel Adams' prints.

It's like the internet now. It's so democratic that everyone gets heard equally, be they moron or expert.

Including, I suppose, me.
 
The additional layer of abstraction of black and white photography requires a greater degree of engagement in the viewer; it gets deeper into the brain due to the additional processing involved. One deals more with the idea of the object (in black and white), rather than the surface of the object in colour photography. Just my opinion, ymmv.
 
FrankS said:
The additional layer of abstraction of black and white photography requires a greater degree of engagement in the viewer; it gets deeper into the brain due to the additional processing involved. One deals more with the idea of the object (in black and white), rather than the surface of the object in colour photography. Just my opinion, ymmv.
Click to expand...

I always thought the abstraction that B&W offers adds a certain "cool" or novelty factor that the average person finds to be appealing just because they aren't used to seeing B&W as much as color (since color is used everywhere and is seen by most with their own eyes).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top