Color, B&W and senility.

Bill Pierce

Bill Pierce

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Which do you like best, black-and-white or color? I go both ways. I take a lot of pictures that are just to preserve a personal moment - family, family visits, friends visiting, the house, the garden, the party (friends and strangers), the special occasion. The form and composition of these pictures is hardly important; they are subject oriented memory boosters. And color often makes them a little more enjoyable, even more interesting at times. Sometimes the bright colors save a dull picture.

Then we come to the good stuff, interesting content and effective form/composition. With those images color often gets in the way and lessens both the initial impact and long term beauty. Of course, if it’s a professional shoot, you invariably are asked to shoot in color. But that’s the beauty of digital. The client gets color and you get black-and-white. I just counted the framed prints on the walls of my home. Sixteen are pictures I have taken. Forty-five were taken by other photographers. Of the sixty-one, five are in color.

I don’t think you can make hard and fast rules. The best of photography exists in both the worlds of black-and-white and color. But, in general, color often saves my tail with the snapshots and gets in the way with the rare but precious good stuff.

I wonder if you have noticed anything similar or if you think your host is obviously slipping into senility.
 
For me, black and white film wins. If I had to satisfy a client, then it may not be so cut and dried. My important family stuff is also mono, with some daily fun stuff shot and shared on a phone.
 
Only few people whom I personally know likes B/W. I like B/W, but nobody at home.
I like how B/W separates people from else.
I like color on hot and very cold sunny day. For grey and murky winters of Ontario's South I switch M-E to B/W in camera JPEG1.
 
Digital is 100% color. I can process, making black & whites , with my computer.

Film is 100% black and white. I don’t scan film.
 
I am certainly a color photographer generally speaking. I was into color even when I had to print c-prints in the darkroom. However, I also like and do black and white. As a digital photographer, I have time for both and certain things work better in one over the other.
 
After many years of shooting b&w film, I began to shoot color (influenced by the likes of Eggleston, Leiter and Shore). I’ve learned to see and shoot in color and will choose it in a scene if the color is a compelling factor. For telling a story, texture, mood, any value of light, shadow or contrast - I will choose B&W. Now, if I am using film, invariably it is color film as I can choose a conversion later if needed.

Then again, I still load the occasional Tri-x into the darn thing. I guess I’m an old school guy at heart.
 
After turning sixty (I'm sixty-five now), my eyes noticeably improved and I have developed a much better sense of color. (My doctors confirm this by vision tests ... lest I be deceiving myself).
Long story short: I see colors much better and find that color rendering, for the M8 series anyway, in Capture One is more than a bit over the top. Truly cartoonish?

I have shot lots of film ... mostly black and white over the last thirty five years and find myself adding more color film to the weekly mix because it looks .... well, more like color .... I use the digital camera for "sketches" or for quick turn around work for some local publications here.

But, of course, I can do this now that I'm retired.
 
I started photography shooting B&W. Later I shot color but my first love was B&W. Today I shoot 100% digital and I can have it either way. But, in the end, I still love B&W. Very little of what I shoot ends up being color. And I see very little color being shot by anyone these days that I like.
 
jsrockit said:
I am certainly a color photographer generally speaking. I was into color even when I had to print c-prints in the darkroom. However, I also like and do black and white. As a digital photographer, I have time for both and certain things work better in one over the other.
Click to expand...

When I look at your pictures, the color works, much more than it does for me. I wonder if how we started has any effect. I was raised as a black-and-white photographer. When I was in junior high school I had a darkroom in my basement - an Ansco Pioneer, Kodak Tri Chem packets (developing film in flower pots) and contact printing it on Azo. Even all those years shooting for the “Colorful News Weekly” and others, my personal work would be in black-and-white. Did you move to color fairly early in the game?
 
I like color if the color is part of the composition and without the color the photo fails. If the color is extraneous to the photo then not only it is unnecessary but rob the photo of the tonality and grey scale if it had been shot in b/w. This is as succinct as I can articulate my feelings on the subject. When I look at works by various photographers who does great work in color I can confirm this statement. My opinion only of course.
 
Hi Bill -

I'm not really a fan of street photography, but someone started a thread for color street photography here some time back. I often find street photos to have very cluttered, chaotic backgrounds in B&W, but I was surprised to see that the addition of color added definition (there are more hues in color than shades in B&W) and reduced the chaos.

I shoot color pretty exclusively. Years ago, when I got my first serious camera (a 35mm SLR), my goal was to shoot B&W. I soon realized that when sending my B&W or color negative film out for developing and printing, I didn't have control over the final result. I didn't have access to a darkroom then, nor did I in succeeding years, moving in and out of the country.

So, I turned to color slides for that control over the final image. I really like slides and I find them to be a different experience from color negative.

Now, I could shoot B&W negatives, develop them easily at home, and scan them, but I'm so far divorced from the medium that I haven't been able to achieve B&W vision. I occasionally see B&W that I really like, but I see an awful lot of it that I don't.

- Murray
 
I tend to shoot in color then if I feel the need will convert to black and white. If it is just a snap shot for personal use then I do not process it much. But if it is an image I want to publish on Flickr, say, usually I tend towards color but having said this, I let the picture decide.....some images simply look good in color but some do not.....at least to my eye. Quite often this can be due to some odd color casts that I have been unable to fix satisfactorily in post due most often to mixed lighting sources - street photos can suffer from this quite a lot due to their nature especially if there is a lot of advertising around. And sometimes it is just because a specific image works better in black and white - black and white can create mood better in some instances and I love moody images that look as if something emotional is "going on " in the scene.

If I like the subject and composition but not the color I will try the image in black and white to see how it scrubs up. In any event even if I stick to color, I almost never just go with color straight out of the camera - my personal preference is that I like a more "color-subdued", "painterly" rendering and usually achieve this in post. Hence my color shots are processed somewhat too.

When I say I let the image decide if it wants to be in color or black and white this one below is an example. I do not hate the color version, in some ways it's quite nice but I thought it was a bit lacking in a certain something. So I reprocessed it as black and white and feel that version has more "oomph" - it somehow adds tension to the image that is not present in the color one. Or is it my imagination????

uhS2qXQ.jpg


At the Cafe Door by Life in Shadows, on Flickr
 
Peter, I prefer the color version of this photo, as the B&W looks flatter to me.

To my own personal esthetic, the softening and muting you do in color works well, but it doesn't look right to me in B&W.

- Murray
 
CMur12 said:
Peter, I prefer the color version of this photo, as the B&W looks flatter to me.

To my own personal esthetic, the softening and muting you do in color works well, but it doesn't look right to me in B&W.

- Murray
Click to expand...

Its good to know because people's tastes and opinions differ. I have struggled to find a good compromise with black and white. In general I am never happy when I try a high contrast "punch the viewer in the eyes" black and white style that seems so popular at the moment. It somehow never really looks right to me when I do it. But I am never totally content with my softer rendering in black and white either - just as you say. Still I think my marginal preference and it is only marginal with this specific image is the black and white one - something about the mood though I cannot put my finger on it. I am more than happy if others prefer the color one though. After all in general it's my style preference too otherwise I would not use it so much.
 
All of the prints framed on our walls are black and white; all of my paintings are in colour.

In percentage terms virtually everything I have ever shot for myself in film has been in monochrome, the exception being about twenty boxes of Kodachrome and a few 120 rolls of Agfa slides.

I stepped into the world of digital around 2006 and started shooting colour; the colour percentage since has gone up but boy has it been a struggle to get images with which I am happy!

I love Eggleston, Leiter, Herzog and our very own Colton Allen but try as I might, my camera is almost always set to Acros black and white.

With a camera I live in a black and white world. Back in 2013 I wrote an article about it here:

https://asingulareye.wordpress.com/2013/05/09/my-monochrome-world/
 
Out to Lunch said:
On color photography, this movie presents the life and work of Saul Leiter, one of the early 'colorists': "In No Great Hurry 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter". The trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6-sXRc_xZ4 The full movie used to be on YouTube but it seems to have been removed. The DVD is for sale on Amazon.
Click to expand...

I love Saul Leiter. He was a great.
 
Bill Pierce said:
When I look at your pictures, the color works, much more than it does for me. I wonder if how we started has any effect. I was raised as a black-and-white photographer. When I was in junior high school I had a darkroom in my basement - an Ansco Pioneer, Kodak Tri Chem packets (developing film in flower pots) and contact printing it on Azo. Even all those years shooting for the “Colorful News Weekly” and others, my personal work would be in black-and-white. Did you move to color fairly early in the game?
Click to expand...

Thank you Bill. Yes, I probably photographed in B&W exclusively for a year (with a Pentax K1000 as many other students did) and then tried to do both (as well as some alternative processes like Van Dyke and Cyanotypes). Ultimately, after a few years I moved on to color negatives and c-prints only. Now, I only use digital, but during the last few years, I`ve been trying to do more B&W again, but if I had to choose...it would be color.
 
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