Why B&W on vintage camera ?

[Pioneer]

You are probably right. I wasn't thinking about it from the art school perspective, just from personal experience with family photography. I have a big box of stuff from Mom that was passed down when she died Snaps of my great grandfather from WWII are even there. Most of it is in color. The colors are in bad shape, especially photos that hung on a wall but it is still in color. It was a big deal for some of them. I had one great aunt that I seriously doubt would even have bought a roll of black & white film. My Aunt Eva is in her 90s but when she visited us a few years back she couldn't understand why I was shooting in black & white. Everything she shot was on slide film. She didn't say anything but I definitely got the sense that she thought that I was wasting my time. 😀

 

[Retro-Grouch]

You are probably right. I wasn't thinking about it from the art school perspective, just from personal experience with family photography. I have a big box of stuff from Mom that was passed down when she died Snaps of my great grandfather from WWII are even there. Most of it is in color. The colors are in bad shape, especially photos that hung on a wall but it is still in color. It was a big deal for some of them. I had one great aunt that I seriously doubt would even have bought a roll of black & white film. My Aunt Eva is in her 90s but when she visited us a few years back she couldn't understand why I was shooting in black & white. Everything she shot was on slide film. She didn't say anything but I definitely got the sense that she thought that I was wasting my time. 😀

Of course. Color was more. And who doesn't like more?😉

 

[farlymac]

Another thing about most pro or journalist photographers back in the old days of early color films shooting in b&w is because the publications they worked for didn't print in color. Not just newspapers either. I have bunches of old photography magazines that even though some of the advertising would have color in the graphics, almost all of the photo images were in b&w.

On a more personal note, my dad back in WWII would shoot color slides, but if he wanted prints, he'd shoot b&w. Color film was more expensive for a long time, and since most of his photos after the war were usually of family, he did those almost exclusively in b&w until around the late sixties/early seventies. Double-print marketing got him to shoot color again, but no slides.

PF

 

[ChrisPlatt]

Remember when available color film and processing cost considerably more than BW;
witness the great proliferation of half-frame 35mm cameras in the 1960s.
These made shooting color film less expensive.

Chris

 

[stampfiddler]

A very interesting question and thread. For me, shooting B&W in my vintage camera is about trying discover whether I've learned anything about making a photograph in the past 50 years. Instead of carrying a camera with a microprocessor, I'm going back to basics to determine if the wet computer between my ears can render a successful image of what I felt. I'm no longer completely obsessed with razor sharpness and precise exposure.

Looking for colour images is a different hunt than looking for B&W images. I've always felt that the subject of a colour photograph should be the colour itself, otherwise the colour simply gets in the way.

I love the visual feel of a B&W image well-printed on silver gelatin fibre paper. To my eyes, the same image printed digitally has a different, flatter look.

On the other hand, discovering my digital camera has allowed me to capture colour images I never could have made with film and this excites me. But it would never occur to me to make a digital image of something I intended to render in B&W. That's for my film camera.

 

[Richard G]

I like color photography, I just don't like my color photography. For exactly this reason—when I take a color photo, I feel like I'm just reproducing the scene in front of me. It leaves nothing to the imagination, and I don't feel like I'm creating an image.

This is just how I think about my own photographic and creative process. I know a lot of other photographers are very creative with color photography, but it's just not how I see the world, or at least not how I'd like to express my vision of it.

And for me, this doesn't just apply to my "vintage" film cameras; most of what I shoot on my iPhone is either black and white from the start, using either a camera app like Argentum, Provoke, or Hipstamatic, or the Noir filter in the stock Apple Camera app. Even if I shoot a digital photo in color, it's usually with the specific intent to convert to black and white later.

Michael Kenna the black and white master photographer says this about his work. He is not tyring to achieve some accurate record of what is in front of him. What is there is a canvas on which he creates his image.

 

[CMur12]

Another thought:

I feel that if I don't shoot color film, at least part of the time, I'm not making full use of a good lens.

I mean, ANY lens can do B&W, right? 😎

- Murray

 

[Coldkennels]

I feel that if I don't shoot color film, at least part of the time, I'm not making full use of a good lens.

I mean, ANY lens can do B&W, right? 😎

...and like I said earlier, if you're not shooting colour slide, any lens can do colour.

When I went to grab some files of a weird fungus for @Rob MacKillop's "Alien" thread, I realised that the two lenses I used produced wildly different colours in the same scene in the same light on the same camera:



And yet, with less than five minutes of playing with the DNG, we get this:



I probably could still have got the colour of the close-up photo closer to the wider one - it's still a tad blue - but it's close enough for a forum post.

So much colour balancing happens in-camera or in-scanner (even in commercial labs) - and so much is possible with the digital files - that I really don't care what the "colour rendering" of a lens is like.

 

[Richard G]

...and like I said earlier, if you're not shooting colour slide, any lens can do colour.

When I went to grab some files of a weird fungus for @Rob MacKillop's "Alien" thread, I realised that the two lenses I used produced wildly different colours in the same scene in the same light on the same camera:

View attachment 4885952

And yet, with less than five minutes of playing with the DNG, we get this:

View attachment 4885953

I probably could still have got the colour of the close-up photo closer to the wider one - it's still a tad blue - but it's close enough for a forum post.

So much colour balancing happens in-camera or in-scanner (even in commercial labs) - and so much is possible with the digital files - that I really don't care what the "colour rendering" of a lens is like.

That was the amazing thing about Kodachrome. At dusk when the M9 often gives a bluish cast depending on how some corners are lit, Kodachrome was still spot on.

 

[das]

Easy -- black and white is way, way easier to correct than color. 🙂.

 

[laservampire]

I enjoy putting the most saturated colour films through older single and uncoated lenses. Ultramax with a Nikkor-S 5cm f1.4 rangefinder lens is a thing of beauty.

 

[WJJ3]

Black and white film bulk loaded and developed in the bathroom sink saves some money.

This answer sums it up why I shoot B&W. If money were no object, I would shoot Ektar 100 and have every roll hand developed and custom scanned.

 

[Bingley]

I rarely shoot color film with a vintage camera. But when I do, I use a Leica IIIc and a Summaron 35mm f3.5 with Kodak Color Plus 200...

Warm November by Steve Macfarlane, on Flickr

 

[mconnealy]

Developing C-41 color film is really no more difficult or time consuming than b&w. The savings over commercial lab processing is considerable. Processing can be accomplished in a very short time as developer temp can be quite high. The turkey basters and other temperature control schemes are really not needed.