Falling out love with Colour

[Gary Tarbert]

Hi i have just spent several hours editing some shots taken on digital , I was amazed how many i converted to black and white , Even dusk shots with lovely pink skies were converted and i preferred the B&W , It has been a gradual change in taste for me over the last few years , Being a former Velvia shooter (this is an amazing turnaround), i even ordered some from Stone a while back , , I have not shot a sheet yet thank god it was well dated !! I have even converted some old velvia shots to B&W and prefer them .I have a 100 sheets of B&W 8x10 to get through i think on present trend i will finish them before i have used 10 sheets of the Velvia. I was just wondering has anyone else experienced this sort of change in the way they see things so dramatically ?, (oh maybe i should have called the post falling in love with B&W)more positive

[Vaughn]

All too few people use color in their images...they just find a nice color and photograph it. But then too few B&W people use light in their images...they just find a neat atmospheric condition or a neat subject and photograph it.

[LabRat]

Yea, I prefer B/W too...

I find B/W more cerebral, as the tone scale is an abstract of our normal color vision, and by tweaking the process while shooting and in the lab, one can make many different scales of tone that have different moods/feel/vibes... (Like different scales of music...)

Someone once asked me about the practical differences of shooting B/W vs color... I said that color differentiates changes in hue and chroma well, but B/W sees differences in contrast and scale well... (If you shoot a sunset with many subtle shades of color, color film will do well, but B/W not... But if you were say, on a forest floor with dramatic contrasts, color would be at a loss, but B/W would be dramatic, etc...)

But one uncommon thing I have noticed about B/W is (rarely) some viewers of a print do not have the ability to recognize what is happening on a B/W print... (It makes their head spin!!!) Maybe it's just too abstract for them when viewing a fine art print... But they would "get" a color poster of puppies-in-a-basket with color balloons...

Steve K

[StoneNYC]

It comes and goes.

I've not shot any serious color in a while (but plan to very soon).

Your brain starts seeing in B&W tones.

But you can fall back in love with color once you see those big beautiful 8x10 color Velvia50 transparencies on the light table

[Alan Gales]

I've always been a color guy. When I started shooting 35mm in 1982 I felt that b&w was behind us. Old technology just like b&w television sets. My favorite photographer was Pete Turner. I was in love with Kodachrome 25 and Cibachrome printing. I shot color for color.

Today, I love b&w. Especially b&w portraiture. Why the change? I'm not sure I know. I still enjoy color but there is just something mysterious about the tonality of b&w. It's other worldly.

[Gary Tarbert]

One of the ones i converted today

[Old-N-Feeble]

Those are both fabulous, Gary. I do prefer the mood of the monochrome version though. It has more moody impact, IMO.

[redshift]

One of the ones i converted today

These illustrate success in both color and b&w because they capture both composition and light.

A photo with brilliant color can be initially compelling without artful composition or light, a B&W of the same fails.

For me, a compelling B&W is more challenging to produce. I prefer the challenge.

[h2oman]

I'm starting to go the other way...

[Kirk Gittings]

All too few people use color in their images...they just find a nice color and photograph it. But then too few B&W people use light in their images...they just find a neat atmospheric condition or a neat subject and photograph it.