Color?

Bill Pierce

Bill Pierce

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We’ve talked a lot about printing in black-and-white and about b&w photography in general. Certainly, pre digital it was easier to set up a black-and-white darkroom to make prints that reflected the way you saw the subject even though firms like Jobs and Kodak made relatively affordable drum style processors that could process color film and prints in a home darkroom. While photographers like Gene Smith and Ansel Adams, photographers that we think of as black-and-white, shot a small amount of color film, there were few photographers who concentrated on color and received that level of critical praise for personal color work. In part that was because most color prints were relatively unstable and did not have a long life. Color was for commerce. (Time, “the colorful newsweekly,” was probably as interested in selling color ad pages as color journalism.) Between the difficulty of do-it-yourself color and the impermanence of most everything short of a the not-so-easy dye transfer print, a lot of photographers chose to stick with black-and-white.

Nonetheless, there were a few outstanding photographers like Ernst Haas, Pete Turner, Joel Meyerowitz, Saul Leiter and Eliot Porter who made the obvious even more obvious. Color pictures can be really good. However, at that time color printing was really a bitch. It isn’t any more. Digital and inkjet changed that. Now we choose between black-and-white and color, not through expediency, but through what works for us in terms of the final image. And, I have to say, sometimes color and the ability to manipulate it will save one of my not very successful photographs from the trash can or the erase key.

Digital has done a lot of things to change photography. Perhaps one of the good things is the ability for all of us to easily choose between color and b&w. Agree? Disagree? Your thoughts on how it effects your work?
 
There has been too much going on in my life to take up printing again, so I will have to leave that discussion to others.

I have always been primarily a black and white photographer, however I do dabble in color and have several ongoing projects in color. I’ve honestly never been good at it, but enjoy the challenge of getting a color picture that comes together just right. RAW files from the Fuji X-Pro1 processed Capture One are fairly easy and very pleasant to work with. I will sometimes use presets of my own, presets from Ted Forbes, sometimes use so light a touch you can barely tell I've done anything and sometimes I will just play with sliders with my intuition.

The pandemic has restricted my travel and ability to be near others so I have recently been shooting some suburban architecture on Ektar 100 with my 645 cameras in the drab vernacular of analog social media influencers, just to experiment.
 
Digital has been a revelation for color for me. I absolutely hated working in the darkroom balancing my color negatives for c-prints. I found b&w a lot easier in the darkroom. However, now I find the reverse true. B&W in digital is harder than color. This is my opinion only.
 
Scanning 35mm negatives to DNG and processing in Adobe Camera raw, the color channels are all there and available to color balance to your heart’s desire. I just ordered my first 12x18 metal print from a digital file scanned from a 35mm color negative and I anticipate it will be outstanding.

Next on the list for me is, doing my own C41 processing at home so, if I do have to work around negative scratches, it’s my own fault.
 
From OP list, I know Meyerowitz and Leiter. Meyerowitz never impressed me. I have seen his pricey color prints in real and had his Redheads book (it was for sale dirt cheap).

For earlier color I respect Fred Herzog and William Eggleston.
Adams was getting assignments for color work from Kodak, according to him.

My family thinks b/w belongs to soviet time. Then nothing was common. And one of local magazines never took my B/W film pictures. Only color.

About film, digital and color. I've been reading some old digital cameras reviews latelly. It is funny. In addition to common of these days "Leica M9 renders it like Kodachrome", many of those old digital cameras reviews have same spin.
 
As a former professional photo-lab printer, and color copy camera art photographer I agree of how digital improved the ability to reproduce the color. Before digital the reproduction of paintings' color on transparency film was a compromise; when one got one of the colors right, the other colors came out completely wrong! Now, thanks to editing software, with the digital it's easy to manipulate the separate colors to be able to reproduce the original more faithfully.
 
Color in the past but not that far back, didn't produce consistent scanning results. At least until I read Swift1's tutorial on scanning C-41 negative. So now I use his method and then export/import to ColorPerfect. Now for me it is easy, Virgil the 'philosopher' during the reign of Caligula implied 'there is no such thing as a free lunch.' But I think I've found one.


This one is with Pro-Image film, poor-man's Portra, great for skin tones (not this image):

Pro-Image Kodak by John Carter, on Flickr

Now I send prints to Costco which wet prints (still) and I'm happy.
 
I do very little color today. Oddly (or not) I was originally drawn to digital because it was easier to do color. I kept shooting B&W on film for some time after moving to digital for color. Eventually, my B&W roots won out and my digital went to shades of grey.
 
I did a little experimenting with Unicolor drum processing in the early 1970's and with Cibachrome in the early 1980's. I didn't love the results that I got for the effort that went into it and went back to B&W pretty quickly. I agree that digital changes the equation quite a bit--being able to control color in Photoshop with a good monitor is a lot easier than a wet color darkroom, but for my personal work I still prefer B&W on film. And I still prefer the look of darkroom prints in B&W over inkjet, although I admit this is probably personal bias.
 
Bill Pierce said:
Digital has done a lot of things to change photography. Perhaps one of the good things is the ability for all of us to easily choose between color and b&w. Agree? Disagree? Your thoughts on how it effects your work?
Click to expand...

I certainly agree that digital has made it easy to decide to work in B&W or color. My color work is now digital.

My view differs from the majority here. I find that at the beginning of a project, most of them lasting years, it becomes apparent to me if the information I wish to convey / the emotion I wish to evoke are best done in B&W or color. If B&W, it also seems apparent if it should be done with 35mm or Medium Format. It's never a technical thing as I am comfortable with either. I just choose whatever I think will be most effective for what to accomplish.
 
I taught Cibachrome years ago at a college, using the most basic methods. Roll a drum along the bench for the correct time, no drum rollers for us, too expensive.
My own work was and still is B&W from film processed at home.
Colour is done by a good printer/ friend only if needed.
Philip
 
As the character 'Joe' in Wim Wenders fabulous film The State Of Things said: "Life is in color, but black and white is more realistic".
Seriously though: for decades, starting in the early 1970's, I wanted to shoot color like Ernst Haas and all the others you mentioned (though Saul Leiter was unknown to us then). Kodachrome 25, processing, and the insane cost (remember the $200 8x10's from then high-end labs?) of having prints made made it pretend avocation for me. Color darkroom at home was totally out....a gigantic time-waster IMO.
With digital capture and inkjet printing, FINALLY I have color that's completely under my control.
 
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