Black & White – a natural progression?

[uniB]

I've been wondering...

I came into large format photography as colour photographer having previously used a digital SLR. I did so as I was generally disappointed with the quality of digital. I was also inspired by the likes of Joe Cornish (http://www.joecornish.co.uk/), having seen his gallery prints I knew I had to go LF.

Recently though I've started to consider shooting in black and white and I'm also considering processing the film myself. I know that many (most?) LF photographers shoot mainly in black and white (having seen many fine examples on this forum) – my question is; is black and white a natural progression when shooting LF? I'd never considered B/W before, why now? Is it something to do with the methodological nature of taking a LF photo, is it that the quality of the prints that makes it more 'art' than lesser formats, desire to control the whole process or is it the unconscious need to follow in Ansel's footsteps (maybe not literally)??

Ha - that knock at the door means my Lee B/W filter set have arrived :) ...

[Bruce Barlow]

I find black and white to be more emotionally expressive.

I find color to be incredibly hard to get wonderful pictures with. Good, yes. Wonderful, no.

I think Paul Strand said about color: "Why inject another completely uncontrollable variable into an already uncontrollable medium?" He was the Man.

No knocks on those who use color, it just isn't for me.

[Bruce Watson]

My own twisted view of this is that for some scenes color is a distraction. When you strip away color it's easier to see the underlying structures, patterns, and visual rhythms. Depending on what story you are trying to tell, this can be either a good thing or a bad thing.

For some people it's all about color and the story they are trying to tell is told by shifting hues and the complex relationships between the hues. As Mr. Barlow said, mastering this level of complexity is very difficult.

For some people it's all about the structures, textures, and details. B&W is the natural framework for telling this kind of story. In my view, mastering this level of complexity is equally difficult.

What LF does for photographers is allow them to slow down and really think about what they are trying to do, about the story they are trying to tell. This is what will push people toward B&W for some scenes and color for others. And eventually they may find that they begin to "see" mostly one way or the other. The nice thing is that with LF it's almost always a conscious choice.

[Bill_1856]

I think most people get "into" B&W because of the HIGH COST of doing color -- it has nothing to do with the aesthetics. Obviously, this consideration no longer applies in digital capture and printing.

[roteague]

I'm just the opposite. I started out doing B&W, but gradually moved to doing almost exclusively color (Joe Cornish's work, is one reason why). I find I can convey the things I see and feel about a location much better in color - one of the reasons emotions are often tied in with certain colors. With B&W you lose that edge, IMO.

[Ed Richards]

I am with Bruce - I do black and white for the aesthetics. Where cost does come in is that there are times when I would shoot color neg film for black and white, but the cost of the film, the processing, and the hassle of sending it off to be processed, deter me.

The color photographers I like - Jay Maisel is the best example - use color in ways that having nothing to do with the LF world. If I wanted to shoot color, I would use digital. I find that all the detail of LF plus color makes pictures that are too distracting to be great, even if they are good. If you do not need the detail, LF is not worth the trouble for me.

[Eric Biggerstaff]

This is a great question and thanks for posting it.

I started in color and still use it every once in a while, in fact I am starting to carry some sheets with me for the first time in many years.

I went towards black and white early as it seemed to better fit what I wanted to express when out photographing. B&W allows me to see the world as it isn't, if you will. Also, the photographers whose work I most admired were all B&W photographers so I naturally gravitated in that direction in school and post school. Lastly, I love the hands on process of working in a traditional darkroom so B&W fits my personality well.

For me B&W plays a sweeter song than does color. I can enjoy color photographs, but they shortly become to "real" for me and I lose interest where B&W images tend to stay with me much longer. There are a few color photographers whose work I really like (Stephen Wilkes as one example). Also, I tend to not like the "bigger is better" rule in color photography these days ( I think people are perhaps more in love with printing technology and seem less concerned with making a great picutre).

Color and B&W are equally difficult to master in my opinion and I think very few photographers can master each one.

If B&W strikes a deeper note with you then jump in with both feet and learn all you can. If color is your path, then run down it as fast as you can. Each can be rewarding and each will take a long time to master.

Don't worry about the cost so much, each will drain your pockets as fast as you can fill them! And by all means, have fun. If you enjoy what you are doing, you will learn more quickly and the experience will be that much more rewarding.

[Ralph Barker]

Uni - I think your "discovery" of B&W has as much to do with the timing of your entry into photography as it does any progression of style. As already noted, some of us started with B&W, as the world back then actually was B&W. There were a few locations on the globe where color was emerging - mostly spots visited by National Geographic photographers. ;)

[Brian Ellis]

I don't know how "natural" a progression it is, I went the opposite way. I did only b&w for many many years and only started doing color several years ago. I like both but I find color considerably more difficult. My little saying has been that color tells you what something looked like, b&w tells you what something felt like. Probably an oversimplification but it's just very hard for me at least to make a color photograph that doesn't look like a post card or a documentary. With b&w you're one step away from reality before you even begin so you at least don't have the post card problem though there are plenty of other problems to take its place.

[BarryS]

I don't know if there is such a thing as a "natural progression" in photography, but after getting into digital photography, I found digital black and white very much inferior to film-based black and white. Medium and large format film can deliver a smooth tonality in b&w that seems difficult if not impossible to achieve digitally--at least with affordable tools. So in that sense, you might as well take advantage of one of the great strengths of large format.

[N Dhananjay]

There is an interesting analogue to this in how the brain processes visual information. Visual information processing can be broadly differentiated into a what system (concerned with object recognition and color recognition) and a where system (concerned with location, movement, depth perception and figure-ground organization etc). The where system is actually color blind and this gives rise to some of the most interesting phenomena in art. For example, the impressionist technique of closely placing complementary hues of similar luminance gives rise to a sense of movement is closely related to the fact that the where system being color blind ignores the hue but the what system does proces it and this creates a spatial imprecision that makes the brush strokes seem to 'jitter' around, creating a sense of movement or fluttering etc. There are other differences between the two systems - the where system is more sensitive to contrast and is faster, relative to the what system. There is a very large amount of visual information processing that is completely achromatic or colorblind in that sense. There are a couple of reasons offered for this kind of segregation. One is evolutionary - the where system is similar in most lower mammals, which seems logical given that the functions it serves have primitive biological significance. Movement is important for survival in a predator-prey context. Spatial and depth information and figure-ground segregation is important to navigate a three-dimensional world. The evolutionarilly more recent what system was thus probably overlaid onto this earlier system and in that sense, the what system is a primate add-on. The second explanation is that it is more efficient (or parsimonious) to carry information about an object's appearance (shape and color) separately from its motion and trajectory. I find it interesting that engineers in more recent technologies (e.g., HDTV) have arrived at similar strategies to transmit images. Rather than redefine every pixel repeatedly, more efficient strategies are to redefine only those pixels that change or to define an objects shape and color separately from its motion and trajectory, echoing the subdivisions of our visual systems.

So, I suspect this is a very personal decision to do with what visual concerns you are trying to deal with in your art/photography. I paint and that always seemed a more natural way to deal with color concerns for me. What interested me with photography as a medium had to do with the density of information that it conveyed (see Ivins' "Prints and Visual Communication"). Once I started following along those trains of thought, I realized just how much visual information was achromatic in nature and B/W photography became a natural medium to explore these issues. I was also becoming uninterested in 'things' but was more interested in the 'relationships between things' and much (though not all) of that seemed to be achromatic in nature. Finally, as much as we live in a modern world of acrylic gloss, the truth is we inhabit a fairly 'grey' world, for the most part. Saturated color is the exception rather than the norm and I was a little uninspired with color photography which seemed mostly about searching for saturated color. I think Edward Weston's advice to Cole about 'seeing color as form' is worth pondering. I find much (not all) of color photography degenerates into a sort of 'making portraits of things' which I'm not terribly interested in, but that may just be betraying my visual concerns.

Cheers, DJ

[Bill_1856]

My little saying has been that color tells you what something looked like, b&w tells you what something felt like.

That's a profound observation, Brian. Thanks.

[Richard M. Coda]

Color blindness did it for me ;^)

[MIke Sherck]

Black and white lets me produce prints which show the picture the way I want it to look. I'e shot a lot of color and it all looks like snapshots to me, and not very good snapshots at that. The first time a black and white print came up in the developer I said "That's what I meant!". I shoot a few sheets of color every once in a while, but they all still look like snapshots to me.

[Thomas Greutmann]

For me the natural progression was just the other way round. I started photography with small format and color and moved to B&W at some point, still small format. I think a trip to the American Southwest at that time and some books with B&W photography from the area had a lot to do with it. Those pictures rung a bell inside me. I continued with small format for a while, then moved to medium format. This was just a couple of years ago, and digital was already big. So labs who did my B&W development closed shop and I started to do my own development. Only after I had learned this I finally moved to LF (well, maybe that is not final, you never know). So in that sense LF was the natural progression of having moved to B&W before.

So, I guess there is always a natural progression but it will be a very different one for everyone. Different starting points, different endings (if there is an ending) and different paths.

I have stuck with B&W since I started with it, only the negatives have increased in size. As already mentioned in this thread the choice between B&W and color is a matter of personal preference, and I agree it is difficult to do both B&W and color because you have to look at things completely different. What may be a perfect subject for color may be a poor snap in B&W and vice versa.

Greetings, Thomas

[PViapiano]

I love B&W, it brings the emotions home and besides, it's great to have negatives to print in the darkrrom ;-)

But I've also shot a fair amount of color, all transparencies, in LF. Recently on a trip to Maui, I shot about 25-30 sheets of Provia, and only 5 sheets of TXP. (Hoping to have some of these online soon)...but knowing that I wasn't going to be back there anytime soon, I wanted to get the colors down, however obligatory the photos may seem afterwards. Does this make sense?

I think that you have to see differently, actually visualize differently with your choice of film, ie, today on my way home from a rehearsal in downtown LA I stopped the car to shoot a diptych that I had scoped out a few days ago. I saw the finished print in B&W in my mind (a 4x5 diptych with rebate showing) and that's what I went with. Now I can't wait to develop these negs. I also didn't shoot any safety shots, just the 2 negs and that was it. I'm always trying to build my confidence when I'm out on the street shooting. Of course, sometimes your materials fail you, albeit rarely, but that's a chance I'm willing to take...

All in all, I think that you just have to let your instincts tell you which way to go for whatever particular purpose you have in mind. I think it's good to be versed well in all of the materials available to you...just my two cents.

[evan clarke]

I do B&W because I like it...EC

[Matt Blaze]

I moved predominantly into black and white for my non-snapshots about five or six years ago, which is when I realized that color adds little to (and often detracts from) the subjects I most often shoot and the kinds of photos I like to create. There seem to be two factors at work here. When I "pre-visualize" a potential photo, I'm usually focused (sorry) primarily on the relationships between shapes in the composition (and, to a somewhat lesser extent their tonality) and not so much on the colors. It's just something about the way I see. Also, I've not mastered the theory and practice for effectively exploiting relationships between colors. It's probably well worth learning that -- artists who understand color well can produce stunning results -- but so far I've not.

Basically, I shoot black and white not because I think it's somehow inherently better or more "pure" than color, but rather because right now I think I lack the particular tools and talents needed to productively make use of this very powerful variable.

[John Kasaian]

I don't think it's "progress" as much as it is exploration. Certainly adding new tricks to your bag is progress after a fashion, but I don't think the order is, or neccesarily has to be in any natural progression.

Making pictures on your cave wall is natural. Whether they are color or monochrome or both dosen't seem to me to be an issue so long as you are satisfied with your medium of expression.

[Colin Corneau]

I'm paraphrasing the words of someone far more accomplished than I, but...

"In colour I photograph someone's sweater; in black and white, I photograph their soul."

I also think it's a unique paradox that a process that's "simpler" actually becomes more complex, the more you delve into it.

[paulr]

I'm staying away from the "what's better" side of the discussion. It's like asking if poems are better than novels. They're different; they do different things in different ways. You'll get a sense of what's better for you after looking at a lot of work or after doing a lot.

The biggest arguement against color in large format is expense. That's merely pragmatic, but it might be a real impediment. I did b+w for most of my photographic life, and when I wanted to experiment with color, I found I couldn't afford it with the big camera. So I borrowed a friend's ancient hasselblad and learned with that.

It WAS a learning experience. Making pictures that work in color is different from making them work in shades of gray. Whichever one you learned on, you'll have to learn a lot of new things to do well at the other.

The only absolute I can think of is that color is easier to print. Analog or digital, it's just easier to get a color print to do what you want than a bw print. In my expereince anyhow. Something about black and white printing ... the subtlest differences can make or break a print.

[rippo]

i shoot both, but i shoot more b/w for economic reasons. if i'm testing, b/w film is cheaper and faster.

that said, it's like discussing the merits of sculpture vs painting. they're different, and involve different dimensions. with color, i find that the end result is often too close to mundane reality, and i must work harder to make the image something special. whereas black and white already removes me a step from reality, making it easier to see something artistic in the image.

at some point, you get to a stage where you can say "this needs to be a color image" or black and white. some people are comfortable picking one side or the other. some need to straddle the fence. some don't know they're a side-picker until they've straddled the fence for awhile.

i also find that i cannot shoot black and white images properly unless there's b/w film in the camera. i've tried to shoot digitally or with color film, knowing i'd convert to b/w later...i can't help myself. if the camera can shoot color, i think 'color'.

[Daniel_Buck]

if I could process color film as easy as I process B&W, I would probably shoot color film as well. However, I do tend to prefer most of my photos (trees, rocks and other landscape details) in B&W. I'm not quite sure why, I just like B&W better for those type of shots. Maybe I subconsciously thing that it "should" be in B&W because that's the way it started, or maybe I actually do enjoy the B&W better, I'm not sure. For cars, I usually like color if it's a newer (shiney) car, if it's a dull/matte or old looking car, I like B&W.

[Brian Vuillemenot]

I only shoot color. We live in a color world; why not incorporate this extra dimension into your photography- it results in a whole lot more possibilities! I've seen many black and white photographs that moved me emotionally, but have never had any desire to produce any myself. Kind of like reading a fine novel or drinking a good beer- it doesn't make me want to start writing or brewing!

I do think that it is important to choose one or the other, and devote your energy to it. Shooting color is a different thought process than shooting black and white, and there are considerable technical differences as well. Ansel produced a volume of color work, and it just doesn't even come close to his black and white masterpieces.

Many of my photographer friends, who shoot mainly black and white, have tried to "convert" me to a black and white shooter, as though I'm somehow below them for shooting color. I think that color is looked down upon, especially among the more elite club of large format shooters. It's probably due to the fact that color is the vehicle for the casual snap shot shooter, and digital cameras shoot in color. Therefore, color is viewed as more ordinary and pedestrian, whereas the true artists use black and white. Without wanting to get into a argument over which is better, I think color gets a bad rap for this reason.

[John Kasaian]

"We live in a color world,,,"---how true! If I were going to shoot color, I'd need to learn a new process, improve my dark room a bit and learn how to print with filters. That in itself would be a "progession" for me in going from b&w to color---the opposite of the original poster's topic!

But I don't have such an urge.

I grew up with B&W television and the family photo albums were B&W back then as well. When color hit the scene in my world I was blown away! How glorious (I could cite Simon & Garfunkle's Kodachrome here!) and when Cibachromes were introduced---it was lust at first sight! "WOW!" was my reaction.
But I couldn't afford Cibachromes then (nor can I afford color 8x10 now) and my color snapshots of long ago shifted into wierd colors. What a bummer! Then I discovered the work of some excellent B&W photographers and my "WOW!" reaction returned, only this time it was in B&W.

Now I shoot just about everything in B&W--even family snaps (my bride is charged with capturing "greens of summer and makes you feel all the world's a sunny day, hay,hey!" With her digi.)

So is there a natural progression from color to b&w or b&w to color? In my experience there is a progression but not one bound by nature.

[CG]

Color or BW? I'd guess the best thing is to get enough experience in both to be fully fluent in the seeing. Seeing in BW is wayyyyy different from seeing in color.

By "seeing" I mean seeing and understanding the way the camera / and post shooting process transform what you "see". It takes a while and a lot of shooting (and probably printing if you are doing BW) BW has and demands a different view of the world, and for me is more difficult. But the difficulty is beside the point. And beside the point I want to make which is that if you are considering what medium to shoot with, you are really choosing, in the end, a way of presenting and interpreting.

That may or may not be some sort of progression. I think of BW vs color as utterly different tools for telling a visual story. It's like wondering whether there is a progression from oil paint to watercolors or vice versa. They just are, and the question is, "which one suits you best".

Best,

C

[leeturner]

I live in a fairly grey part of the UK. The sky is grey, the houses are grey and quite a few of the people are as well. My main photographic activity revolves around recording my environment and b&w conveys both the look of these old industrial towns and in some ways the atmosphere. of these places.

On the other hand I lived in Southern Africa for many years and took very few mono photographs. Both the continent and the people are colourful and this seemed to subliminally affect my film choice.

Cost is also becoming an issue. With colour neg sheet film running at around $50 for 10 sheets the UK is becoming very pricey.

[Dave Jeffery]

Robert Teague wrote

"I find I can convey the things I see and feel about a location much better in color"

I would imagine that might be especially true living in Hawaii.

I don't know of one underwater photographer that shoots black and white. The colors of Hawaii's marine life put the typical colors of the majority of places on land and underwater on and around the continental U.S. to shame IMHO. Imagine shooting Mahi Mahi, Papio, octocorals, silverswords, strawberry papayas, butterflyfish, oweoweo, lobster eggs, nudibranchs etc. in black and white?

Black and white photography as an art form is no doubt superior to color but for a person like myself that has spent years in a colorful environment there will always be a trade off looking at black and white images. I was not nearly as moved by Ansel Adams images as much as I was when I saw the irridescent blues, greens and yellows on the side of a live Mahi Mahi as well as all the detail.

There are a fair number of people that have a certain degree of color blindness that cannot appreciate color as much as others.

I've lived in 15 areas in North America which are not very colorful compared to coral reef life in crystal clear water. That being said I'm sure I would appreciate black and white photography much more if I had not been exposed to so much color for so many years.

Just another opinion and it's great to hear all the different viewpoints.

All the best!

[Dick Hilker]

Thanks, Brian! When you said "that color tells you what something looked like, b&w tells you what something felt like," you crystallized something I'd long felt, but never quite brought into such sharp focus.

Like so many older photographers, I started with B&W, but now use only color film for simplicity since I use relatively little of it as an amateur. That provides the latitude of scanning the negatives and then deciding whether the image is best presented in its B&W or color form. The conversion process is critical, in order to preserve the essential qualities of a B&W image, but it can be done nicely and has occasionally yielded a "twofer."

[uniB]

Thanks for all the great replies and thoughts on my original post, it's made great reading and certainly brings up some interesting points.

What's clear is that location and subject matter play in big part in the road you take. For me BW works well for architecture, abstract work, portrait work and macro. As my work is pretty much only landscape I feel that what I'm trying to portray is lost with BW, I'm moved by the subtle colour of a misty morning or the glorious colour of a sunrise that only I'm witnessing on a particular beach. It's for this reason I have previously shot colour.

I agree that you've got to be particularly good to turn colour into art, it's easy to take a 'picture' of something but much harder to produce something that can be considered artistic. This, of course, is not the case with BW, it's very nature means that it's an abstract view of the subject, people are also conditioned to BW as 'art' – particularly in an age where everyone and their dog have got a reasonable digital camera which can take reasonable colour 'pictures'

I guess I'll keep shooting both and see where it takes me, just got my first BW film back from the lab, so I'm about to scan them and see how it suits me!

[mrladewig]

Black and white photography as an art form is no doubt superior to color

Why? I don't see it this way at all.

As has been said, both have their place.

For those who say color photographs cannot evoke emotion, there are many connections between color and emotion in humans. How many painters painted in black and white? How many concerts or theater performances have you seen that did not use color gels on the lighting? Why are blue or green usually associated with calm or relaxation while red or orange is usually associated with vibrancy? Because color evokes emotional response in humans.

I personally can enjoy black and white photos and even create some nice ones from time to time, but I'm not strongly drawn to B&W for my own photos.

My personal feeling as to why some photographers prefer black and white is that they feel they have more creative control over the process of the image creation. Color film was more difficult and expensive to develop at home and offered less latitude for special processing techniques. Except for those very dedicated to doing the work in their own lab, that meant that you would have to give over half of the creative process to the lab. Then add to that the stability issues related to color photos and that avenue was even less appealing. Now with the digital avenues available there are more tools to express the vision of the photographer/artist. In digital avenues, I would include scanning film. Current printing technology shows great promise in extending the workable life of color prints.

Just as it took a long time for photography to be accepted as an art form (debatable whether this is fully true even now), it will take time for digital photography to generally be accepted as art.

[Peter Galuszewski]

My personal (and I stress that) opinion, is that its silly (to put it mildly) to apply statements of what is "better" to various media used to make art.
I have seen some very, very moving colour work. My personal preference is for B&W, although I look forward to learning colour printing from negatives and transparencies - perhaps with the ability to be as hands on as I am with B&W, I will find more of a calling to the colour side, who knows... But to say one is "better" than the other is an observation dangersously flirting with ignorance.
As to the allure of B&W, in addition to all those already noted, I see it as something akin to musicians going back to their roots, exploring their (not the medium's) ability to express more through a simpler (and I mean simple in the sense of fewer variables, less clutter of information if you will - I by no means intend to imply that B&W photography is "simple"!) medium.
Just my thoughts on it.

Peter.

[CG]

Best?

Maybe it's most useful to note that BW places emphasis on distinctions of brightness, whareas color emphasizes distinctions of color and/or brightness. Each has a "story" to tell. Which is best? Depends upon the photographer and what the photographer would like to say.

C

[John Kasaian]

I agree that to imply that one is "better" than the other is folly. Work with the materials that speak to your heart.

[Gary Nylander]

For myself, I love shooting black and white film, it gives me a unique way to show my artistic vision of the various subjects I have photographed in the world around me.

What I find interesting about this thread in regards to the natural progression idea , if one looks back to the great years of black and white photography the 30's-40's-50's everything was pretty well shot with black and white film back then, there were only a few photographers shooting color ( including Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, who were given samples from Kodak ) but due to it's costs and technical complexity, many photographers from those times generally chose to shoot B & W, because that was the main choice of the day, one either got good at it or you didn't, color was not much of an option.

Nowadays in the digital age, the technical barrier for color has been knocked down ( compared to what it was ) and its far easier to shoot an image in color or for that matter in black and white, it will be interesting to watch future emerging photographers as they explore the color medium and make as much of an artistic statement with color images as others have made with black and white photographs.

[ljb0904]

Honestly, there is no natural progression. You start with whatever grabs you, and YOUR path takes you where you need to go in order to progress as you NEED to. That's it. There is no best and screw all those that say there is. Film is not better the digital nor vice versa. B+W is not better than color nor vice versa. They are the same - it is a medium. It is the artist that makes something good or not. If you suck as an artist, your work will suck whether film or digital, color or black & white. It's what you FEEL that makes something work for you. Can't we leave it at that?

The OP's statement is interesting because I've been contemplating B+W for a little while, and I haven't taken the plunge because I still enjoy color immensely right now. Subtle changes of color and lightness through an image fascinate me. Still, there are images I see where I'd prefer B+W and I love looking at black and white images (preferably good ones, bad ones are just boring :-D )

[Herb Cunningham]

Neither are "better" they are different.

[uniB]

It's funny that my original post has changed slightly – I never asked if one was better than the other, how could it be? They are both of equal worth.

My point was, does the process of shooting large format make one more likely to shoot black and white? This was a question I ask due to my own experience and my recent desire to shoot BW for the first time (for 20 years). This may be down to controlling the whole experience; from loading film to printing the final image, it may be due to the more controlled nature of taking a photo or it may even be down to the costs involved in large format photography. Or maybe it's because large format is closer to 'art' (afterall, BW is considered to be more 'artistic' than colour), if we want to take snap shots for our family albums we're more likely to shoot colour with our digital cameras surely?

[Michael Kadillak]

I do not believe that there is ever a natural progression between color and B&W or vice versa.

When I became interested in photography I considered it as a profession until I realized that it was incredibly difficult if not impossible to make a lucrative career with it. As a result I decided that an engineering degree would untimately allow me to do what I wanted to with my image making.

I only work in B&W because I feel that I have to own the entire process and control it from an esthetic perspective to express myself emotionally. From mixing chemicals to developing films and allocating the time with a busy schedule and a family for the painstaking process of printing, the fruits of your labor are very evident. The few times I have passed off transparency materials to a lab attendent to have processed and got the results back even though they were technically successfully, there was little or no connection to the final product for me. I guess the control freak in me continues to manifest itself. The older I get the more that I realize that I want desperately to stay as far away from my computer during my free time as possible.

Ask anyone that works dilligently in a wet B&W darkroom and they can immediately share with you the intimate details about their work from the moment that they compose an image to when they mounted the print.

At the end of the day to each their own. I respect everyone's desire to express themselves by whatever means that they chose.

Cheers!

[davood_hasani]

I started photography when I was 25 when I bought a 1 Mega pixel digital camera to take picture of the equipment and tools at my working place. One night I saw a full moon that was glowing in the sky and I decided to take a picture. I was so confused when I looked at the result and saw that that big moon was just like a little star in the picture. That was when I started to learn more about photography. I found that the lens on my camera was wide and was not suitable for that kind of photography. After that I moved to a high-end 35mm camera with zoom lens but I was very disappointed when I couldn’t get what I expected from it. My enjoyment started when I bought an old contax camera with a normal lens. What I liked about it was the slow pace and the ability to adjust everything manually and that the resulted pictures were mostly your work not the camera’s. The only thing that was not in my hand was the printing process so I decided to start black and white. I can’t explain the satisfaction that I had when I developed my first black and white film. From that time I spend my best hours in the darkroom. Afterwards I switched to 6x6cm, 4x5” and 6x9cm. I work mostly in black and white because I have full control on my work and I can express myself better this way. Nowadays I use different formats but I never shoot color in 35mm because of the inferior quality. I still shoot black and white in 35mm format for some graphical impressions like the attached picture.

[Andrew O'Neill]

Working in B&W wasn't a natural progression for me. Getting into photography was. My formal training was in drawing and printmaking (silk screening, intaglio, lithography). I moved from printmaking to photography for its ability to capture minute detail. As far as black and white goes, my mother said that when I was a wee lad whenever she dumped a box of crayons in front of me, I always went for the black crayon. But I think the truth is that my older sister hogged all the coloured ones and left the black crayons and white crayons for me...
I guess I just feel more comfortable in a world of gray.

[Peter Galuszewski]

Davood,

That is a lovely image - I think I like everything about it. Well done. Sorry for the off topic comment - couldn`t help it:)

Peter.

[Bob Gentile]

"... does the process of shooting large format make one more likely to shoot black and white..."
As with many others, I started shooting B&W with 35mm way back when. Then, I started to shoot color and, finally, B&W again. (I guess it was a "mid-life, back to my roots" kind of thing.) Anyway, a few years later, when I moved over to LF, the B&W mindset just kinda moved with me.

Having said that, I think many of us were drawn to LF because of the control it affords. Rise and tilt. Swings and shifts. Et cetera. And that goes for exposure control as well, especially as expressed in the Zone System (or BTZS). I believe you can achieve the most control over an image when using the Zone System (or BTZS) with B&W film in a LF camera. So, in that sense, it would follow that LF and B&W have an affinity for each other.

[john borrelli]

As a photographer of the landscape, I find I am more likely to shoot black and white with my 4x5 because of the quality of the large format black and white image. I have a bias toward capturing B&W images containing highly resolved detail. When emphasizing sharpness you need to be able to make a larger image so that this level of detail can be seen. When shooting color with 35mm, my bias was more toward color saturation, and the relationship of the colors than toward the resolution of fine detail in the image. Image size wasn't that important then with color because the qualities of the colors were obvious even in small enlargements.

[Kevin Convery]

I've been shooting LF for about 5 years. Part of my education was you had to learn to use a view camera if you wanted to graduate. Not many students took to it since at the digital was becoming more affordable. You HAD to start in B&W so for the first year I burned through sheets of Ilford all day then when color came along and I thought it was the cats meow and for the last 3 years I've been primarily color but as of the last 6 months or so I've dropped color completely. My main reasonings are this: 1)I started shooting 8x10, No one in the Philadelphia area processes 8x10 C-41 or E-6.* 2)My work is very personal and I'm really into showing things as how I see it as opposed to how they are(hence, I don't do any landscapes or journalist stuff) and as someone in this thread brilliantly said, BW is how the world ISN'T. The lack of color adds to what I want and gives more of a bleak feeling and to an extent forces the viewer to pay attention to the subject.

*I recently was told of Colour Works in Wilmington, DE they are a full service lab(great work from what I hear.) AND someone I know is working on a 4x5 and 8x10 C-41 jobo system in Philadelphia

[nathanm]

Different mediums offer different balances of fantasy and reality. To me the goal of making an artistic image is fantasy. An unreal, subjective improvement over what your eye sees and what you feel.

For the most part a color photograph offers reality and a B&W offers fantasy. Achieving fantasy in color requires either finding or manufacturing a fantastic reality. Black and white is not as restrictive towards this end. You can point your camera at the ordinary world which may not be all that terribly visually appealing to the naked eye and get a reasonably artsy result. With color film you have to have beautiful color and light in order to get beautiful photos, but with black and white it can be a crummy rainy day and you'll get magic on film.

This was made most clear to me by seeing black and white photos from my grandparents which are far more beautiful and fantastical looking than the mundane, color snaps from my era. No extra effort or intent was made in either case by the photographer to create an artistic image; but nevertheless the old black and whites seem like art whereas the color seems purely objective and matter-of-fact.