so/too much colour...

I used to shoot largely B&W film.
When I went digital I noticed I was producing more colour and upon looking back at those shots I concluded most of the time the colour added nothing to the shot and often spoiled it.

In response I changed some aspects of how I worked. I set the my M8 up so it shot DNG but also a low-res Black & White JPG; this meant I could only see a B&W image on the screen at the time of shooting.
I also set up a standard B&W conversion preset in lightroom and generally apply this to all my shots straight away. I find it easier the see the structure of a shot in mono and can always peek at the colour image if interested.

For me the best thing about using colour DNGs to produce B&W images is that you can finely control the conversion of different tones - kinda like having a infinite choice of colour filters for your lens and a lot more time to choose.

There's nothing wrong with colour of course, and it's nice to have the option to use it when the image really benefits. 🙂
 
I used to shoot only black & white but then found that this was a bit of an artificial limitation, created by a sort-of-angsty overappreciation of the apparent extra authenticity of black & white. Nowadays I find myself shooting much more colour, even though I find it much more difficult. Black & white is easier to get right, but some things work only in colour.





Those are just three examples from the last two weeks. None of those would have worked in black & white. Actually the first and last one are black & white in a way, but the colour highlights are necessary to create tension in the image.

Of course everybody has their taste and there's no accounting for it, but thinking one is shooting "too much colour" sounds like artificially limiting oneself.
 
peterm1 said:
I must admit that although I often shoot in color I can relate to what James Ravillious had to say about his reasons for shooting in black and white. Watch this wonderful video if you have not seen it before....................

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYg8mxvUgJE
Click to expand...

That's a brilliant little documentary Peter! Thanks for posting. 🙂
 
Pickett Wilson said:
Are you afraid by shooting color you'll be kicked out of the "serious photographer" club? The real world is in color. Why would you want to manipulate reality by shooting it in B&W? 😉
Click to expand...

Acknowledging the smiley ... ALL photography is manipulation. Some people "see" in b&w when they visualize the photo. So colour is an impediment to REALizing the photograph.

What is reality, anyway? 😉
 
I've recently been getting more seriously into digital photography with my Lumix G1; I'd avoided using SilkyPix and RAW files until I upgraded my PC, which I've recently done.

This week, I found a neat workflow solution (gawd, does that sound like a mouthful of buzzwords) involving temporarily desaturating the RAW image in SilkyPix, then making all the adjustments to exposure compensation, curves, contrast, gamma, black levels, etc, until the B/W image looks near-perfect; then I'd add the color back in, usually to the original level it was at, and finish off the development. I realized that this was a neat trick, and affords me the opportunity to review every image in monochrome first to see if it works better than with color. I end up developing the images as TIFFs in color, after which I can do a conversion to B/W in PS.

~Joe
 
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