What types of pictures look best in black and white?

<p>I personally feel that heavy texture, like an old man's face, or a simple geometric (achitecture/pattern) might be enhanced by black and white. Also, an image that is perhaps too busy might be better viewed in BW whilst leaving the degree of detail up to the viewers imagination.<br />I ask you, what are your thoughts and philosophies on BW. Feel free to post a special BW image.</p>

<p>IMHO the majority of pictures look best in B+W. The exception is when the subject of the photograph is color itself. Frequently color is just a distraction to the true subject , again the exception being when color itself is the subject.</p>

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<p>What type of pictures look best in black and white?</p>

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<p>Black and white pictures. That sounds a little tongue-in-cheek but I'm being serious. I don't think there is a "type" of picture that suits black and white. I think it depends what the photographer wants to express or show and how he or she feels that can best be accomplished. I've seen great textural photos in color and great geometrical pictures in color and great faces of older people in color. I often find the black and white heavily-textured photos of older people exploitive in that they try to wring false pathos out of those people rather than accepting the expressions they have to offer with more directness and simplicity. </p>

<p>As far as color being a distraction, I don't think so any more than black and white poorly filmed or used is a distraction. The world is in color, so poor use of black and white can be much more of an imposition than color, IMO.</p>

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<p>When color detracts. </p>

<p>If color is not needed, it shouldn't be there. If you can't explain why color is needed, it probably isn't needed.</p>

<p>Hey wait a minute here since when is Black and White not color , who removed them from the color chart:<br>

I agree with <a href="../photodb/user?user_id=313114">John Elder</a> , on this subject : But find something's are better in B&W than color for some reason the Calli flower is one of those that is better in B&W than color : Just my two cents</p>

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>>> I ask you, what are your thoughts and philosophies on BW. <P>

 

I shoot portraits of strangers I approach and chat up on the street. Perhaps it is the neighborhoods I

like to shoot in, but color never seems to add, reveal, or compliment. Rather, it usually throws

relationships out of balance. Like everything, there have been a few exceptions. I think commercial,

advertising, some landscape, and sports photography benefit from color.<P>

 

>>> Feel free to post a special BW image.<P>

 

OK...<P>

 

<center>

<img src= "http://citysnaps.net/2011%20photos/MacKenzie.jpg"><br>

<i>MacKenzie • Tenderloin, San Francisco • ©2011 Brad Evans</i>

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</center>

<p>I respond differently to black and white photos than to color photos. I think black and white helps me see more in the image, there is no color that gets in the way. Some people say we dream in black and white, but I dream all the time and I know it isn't true. Last night there was a burning house in my dream and I saw the flames in full color. Come to think of it that was the second dream I've had of a burning house in less than a week. Weird.<br /> Black and white photos seem to reduce the image down to light and shadow, they are more detached from reality, so our imagination has more room to render the image in our minds. Happily it is quite easy to convert a photo taken in color to black and white, as I've done in this one:<br>

[<a href="http://www.smugmug.com/photos/187169530_LVcsy-XL.jpg">LINK</a>]</p>

<p><img src="http://www.smugmug.com/photos/187169530_LVcsy-L.jpg" alt="" /></p>

<p> </p>

<p>Nuns.</p>

<p>On the more serious side, almost everything can look good in B&W.</p><div></div>

<p>Or colour</p><div></div>

<p><br />I'm glad when this topic comes up. I constantly modifying my thoughts about it. I used to be fairly hard-nosed about color being an impossible to control distraction best left to painters. Now I just go with my gut response. Sometimes I like either just as well for the same picture. I just think of them as two different pictures of many possibilities. Original intent now includes the ability to re-think color after the fact. One would be a fool not to factor that in. End-use is expanded. <br>

Compared to natural color, monochrome is a far more abstract and reductive rendering of the scene. This gives the photographer <strong>more </strong>control rather than less. Are the real scene and the picture like a dream where if color isn't significant it doesn't register? I don't know if, by definition, <em>gestalt </em>can be turned down or up or color and subject can be independent. .<br>

The use of either in commercial photography obviously recognizes the big gestalt differences. For one, B/W has more gravitas because it is an "Art" medium. Cinema artists figured out right away the important differences.</p><div></div>

<p>Fred, Lauren, and Brad's pictures couldn't look better any other way - nice! George's color has an appropriately "Old Master's" look. But.. I think I could really enjoy just holding a small B/W silverprint of it. Dave's picture would lend itself to a number of treatments depending on end-use.</p><div></div>

<p>I don't think there are any hard and fast rules, and I think a dogmatic approach to the subject leads to missed opportunities to produce some fine finished work. One think I have noticed in my own photography is that blood always looks better in color. BTW, one of the nice things about Lightroom is that it lets you look at both color and black white versions side by side with very little work.</p>

<p><center><img src="http://spirer.com/images/viet33.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="480" /><br /> <em>The Pigeon Lady, Copyright 2003 Jeff Spirer</em></center></p>

<p>Alan, agree with much of what you say. I had the very same thoughts about our various photos above though. Depending on the colors involved, I might have taken a stab at Brad's excellent photo in color, but it likely would have a been a less iconic vision and I trust Brad got the look he wanted. Of George's two versions I, too, probably prefer the black and white in that instance, though if it were just the face, I'd have a harder time choosing and think both would work quite well, perhaps the color winning out precisely because of its painterly character. It's the case and the table that draw attention to themselve a little too much in color and so take my eyes a bit away from the face in the dark. Some would say that's because color is a distraction. I wouldn't necessarily take that tack. It could just be a matter of those areas being toned down a bit and handled a bit differently in the color version so as not to distract. When I create color and black and white versions of the same photo, I rarely just do a conversion. I handle them very differently both overall and regarding a lot of the details (dodging and burning, etc.)</p>

<p>I think you got much more out of the color version of your photo than the black and white, particularly in terms of depth and some detail. The blue sky turns extremely white in the conversion, and so really becomes an attention-grabber. That can be OK in some cases, but here I'm not so sure it works, given the overall composition. The pink handbag up front gets a little lost in the black and white and I might have wanted to bring that out a little more because it helps define that woman in the scene. A big difference is the relative lack of differentiation in the b/w version of the greenish wall in the back from the ground. That, I think, impacts depth the most in the photo. The black and white, though, does seem to nicely convey the graphic quality, especially of the foreground (wonderful mess of a) structure. So, bottom line, I think the feel of the black and white here goes really well with the content but a lot of the details we are more aware of in the color version (those kids playing in the background, for example) could be reasserted and redefined in the black and white version to make it overall the way to go.</p>

<p>I'm not discussing this in such detail to be nit-picky or really to give you a critique as much as to show the potentials of both black and white and color and their need to be looked at and dealt with quite differently sometimes, which I think is what you were getting at to begin with.</p>

<p>Given that our species sees in colour, black and white has to be considered no more than the compromise available to us before colour photography reached a high standard of quality and became affordable. Yet, as the original post says, there are certain subjects which may appear better in B&W. I shoot in colour now (after 30+ years -- 1960 to 1990something -- in B&W), and convert to B&W only when (a) there are strong shapes in the picture or (b) there's so much damn colour that it becomes distracting or even painful to the eye. I have long held the view that the best colour photographs are those in which the colours are subdued, even close to monochromatic. Of course this does not apply to children's clothes and toys and so on.</p>

<p>One factor not discussed is that B&W is sometimes more useful than color for isolating the subject or drawing attention to certain elements of the image. B&W gives us far, far more postprocessing latitude than color for contrast manipulations. By using rather severe contrast manipulations, a difficult color image (with poor subject isolation or muddy, confusing elements) can be often be made to work quite well in monochrome in a way that would work rather poorly (and look ugly) in color. </p>

<p>FAIW, I tend to default to monochrome for certain types of photography, especially portraiture, and then I move to color only if I see a need. I might have this preference only because I cut my teeth in B&W. That said, my default for anything commercial is color, because that's usually what's expected.</p>

<p>I've been hearing that color is a distraction for decades. Still don't know what that's supposed to mean. Distracting from what your own eyes see when composing?</p>

<p>The world, at least through my eyes, is in color-- artificial manipulations, including desaturating color information into approximations of old black and white film technology, are distractions.</p>

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<p>Distracting from what </p>

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<p>I agree. Distracting from what?</p>

<p>If, in the picture that George Ghio posted, the cabinet had been bright red or green, that would be distracting. In the way in which a bright blob next to the face of the subject in a portrait can be distracting, so can a blob (or even a line) of a strong or contrasting colour. To distract, in this context, is to draw the viewer's eye away from what is meant to be the chief attraction.</p>

"What types of pictures look best in black and white?"

 

The types I take when I've got b&w film in the camera.<div></div>

<p>Life begins in colour with modern digital cameras so the preference to render a particular image in monochrome is perhaps a personal preference with individual differences. </p>

<p>Maybe the question should be "why" do "I" prefer certain (of my own) images in B/W when the native image is in colour. </p>

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<p>If, in the picture that George Ghio posted, the cabinet had been bright red or green, that would be distracting...</p>

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<p>When taking photographs, especially portraits, a good photographer considers the backgrounds while composing. Using black and white to compensate for bad composition is as lazy as shooting everything wide open -- another current fad in certain circles.</p>

<p>No photographer, howsoever good, can always change position, or change the background, or change the subject's position. No photographer, howsoever good, always has all the time in the world to compose a frame: not even in portraits, because portraits are not necessarily of sitters.</p>

<p>I have no idea how to define a 'good' B&W photo, but I know 'em when I see 'em. <br /><br /> Sometimes, when I'm having trouble with a photo in post processing I will do a B&W conversion. It changes the relationships between the objects in the photo and helps me think of the image differently enough to figure out how I want to handle it. Sometimes it remains a B&W, and sometimes it goes back to color. (Thank you Lightroom), This change in relationship between object in the photo, may be the source of the idea that color is 'distracting'</p>

<p>+1 for what Mukul said! Case in point: I saw a toddler asleep in an airport, curled up sweetly next to his mother, with his thumb in his mouth and his favorite, screaming-hot-pink fuzzy pillow under his arm. I quietly asked his mom if it was OK to photograph him, and she quietly gave her consent. So was I supposed to pluck the screaming-hot-pink pillow from under his arm to take the photo, or was I supposed to deal with the issue using the photographic skills I had at hand? I chose the latter, got a really sweet photo, and left the child to get his much needed rest.</p>

<p>Also, some photographers previsualize a scene from the perspective of B&W, which takes a bit deeper previsualization, IMO. Sometimes this decision is made before ever tripping the shutter because of compositional factors. Does that make them lazy?</p>

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