Black and White

[Bill Pierce]

"Bill - if you see this - I'm curious about the "flower pots" - is that literal?"

Yes, and I used red Christmas tree lights for safelights. Fogged a lot of Kodak Velox paper, but I was very young.

 

[Roger Hicks]

Before the advent of photography, in painting schools realism was the way to go, people studied the past masters and tried to paint as realistically as possible, especially portraits. Then photography came along and painters realized that realism was better left to photography... Artists realized times had changed so they needed to paint in new ways... That reaction led to impressionism and expressionism and cubism etc. etc.. Painters left realism to photography and moved on.

B&W film was the medium of choice because color film compared to it was terrible in every sense of the word. Today that is no longer the case... So the same way that realistic paintings of the past are admired but no serious artist paints them anymore, the same way while the B&W legacy of photography is admired, no serious photographer shoots B&W anymore. There are exceptions like Salgado and a few others, but those guys are very few.

Funny, I know quite a few photographers who are "serious" and shoot B+W. Do you ever get to Arles?

Cheers,

R.

 

[Hsg]

Funny, I know quite a few photographers who are "serious" and shoot B+W. Do you ever get to Arles?

Cheers,

R.

As airfrogusmc mentioned Ralph Gibson one of the iconic B&W shooters is still active and shooting digital with M mono, Salgado is still shooting B&W and digital, and I'm sure many more. There is also a new trend of mixing color and B&W and Alex Webb a famous color photographer in his recent work has taken that route.

B&W is always going to be there just like drawing is always going to be there...

 

[Photog9000]

A lot of us love black-and-white.
(3) A lot of digital cameras allow you to convert the viewfinder image to black-and-white, to record a full raw image that can be interpreted in anyway that you want in the future and a jpeg black-and-white that controls the viewfinder image. Looking through a camera’s viewfinder and seeing a black-and-white image is definitely one of the gifts of the digital age. If you haven’t tried it, give it a whirl.

I definitely agree with your #3, Bill. Was not something I could do on my old Nikon D2H bodies but am using this capability on the Fuji X-E1 and X100S since leaving newspaper work and retiring. I usually shoot with a red filter to see what the effect is to clear blue skies.

 

[harpofreely]

I definitely agree with your #3, Bill. Was not something I could do on my old Nikon D2H bodies but am using this capability on the Fuji X-E1 and X100S since leaving newspaper work and retiring. I usually shoot with a red filter to see what the effect is to clear blue skies.

#3 is also my favorite way to shoot my X-E1, raw+jpeg - even if, for a particular scene, I know at the time that I'll use color for the final image, b&w preview helps me concentrate on composition, light/dark relationships, and clean backgrounds. Unless I've hauled out the DSLR (with its superior autofocus) specifically for "action" shots of my kids, XE-1 w/ b&w preview and Canon FD lenses is about 95% of my digital shooting these days and has all but killed non-Leica 35mm for me.