Black & White – a natural progression?

[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.