Are you Black & White or Color photographer?

[riz]

<p>Now - after 10 years in photography - I feel that black & white photography is more powerful, sentimental, and magnetic than color. May be the color is bit distracting.</p>

<p>What do you feel?</p>

[leslie_cheung]

<p>Depends on the photo and what I'm after...</p>

<p>Sure, color can be distracting but it can also add to a photo</p>

[MichaelChang]

<p>I think some pictures can look odd in b/w such as nature and wildlife but in many instances it can be as you described.</p>

<p>I do find color to be much more of a challenge, though.</p>

[steve m smith]

<p>95% black and white. Being English, the other 5% is colour, not color.</p>

[chris_waller]

<p>Ninety-nine percent b+w, colour very rarely. I see shape, form and texture primarily, but then I grew up in an old industrial town where everything was covered in ash, clay and coal dust so we didn't see much colour except for the dull red-brown of rusting iron.</p>

[david_henderson]

<p>I can see that this question can be answered easily by photographers who use film - I mean you choose to buy , carry and load a certain type of material in your camera. For the last 8/9 years I have photographed both with the choices made at the beginning of a trip, or for a particular scene. Rarely did I photograph a subject in colour and b&w. Rarely did i consider afterwards that I'd made the wrong choices. </p>

<p>However once adopting digital and -if you do it right- all photographs stsrt off as colour but conversion to b&w is pretty easy and flexible- to the point that in essence you make every photograph in colour <strong><em>and</em></strong> b&w and any decision you make when planning a trip or even in front of a subject is actually provisional and changeable. I don't know how photographers overcome the curiosity to see what a photograph made with the intended destination of colour looks like in b&w. I don't see how photographers avoid the temptation to decide <em><strong>afterwards, </strong></em><strong> </strong>on editing whether a picture works best as b&w or colour, and the decision becomes one of pragmatism rather than principle. I know that I have many more images with both colour and b&w interpretations now than I ever did, and a surprising number of photographs work in either ( or neither if you're feeling cynical about your work).</p>

[StuartMoxham]

<p>Personaly I prefer B&W to color. I started with color neg films and then moved to slide films but when I started to shoot, develop and print B&W I stayed with B&W for my personal photographs for good number of years. I got back into color with digital but find that I still prefer B&W images over color most of the time. I would shoot B&W all the time now but my wife likes color prints of our kids and trips for her albums. At least I can have my blog in B&W though.<br>

http://sjmphotography.wordpress.com/</p>

[Craig_Cooper11664875449]

<p>Another one 99% B&W... For me B&W is like comfort food and provides emotional attachment which I just don't get from that colour stuff</p>

[yann1]

<p>I shoot film black and white, it suits my needs most of the time, but I may use color when I think the color is needed, when it has to be in the picture, when i want to show a color, and not really anything else.<br>

... Well, I'm more a black and white shooter, since I'm color blind anyway...</p>

[swilson]

<p>I started off shooting all B/W and had full control of the prints, then switch to color slides for a number of years where this image was all what I did then to color prints where I was often frustrated with how the lab made the print. Now I am shooting color with digital and have control of the prints once and again and life is very good.</p>

<p>I have seen B/W photography that I like but it is not for me. Often I think people believe that if they shoot in B/W it will be more artistic, I think there is a lot more to art then just shooting in B/W.</p>

[charles_stobbs3]

100 % color.

[lachaine]

<p>I much prefer B&W, except for subjects where the colour is provided by nature. In the human world, there's way too much unnatural colour all over the place... from cars to recycling bins. Not only is it ugly to my eyes, but it obscures the shapes and textures that I'm interested in. If photography is about recording shadows, then B&W is where you find its most natural expression.</p>

[ilkka_nissila]

<p>Now that I have a B&W capable inkjet printer (Epson 3800), I have gradually started to do more and more black and white work. It is so many times that I prefer a dramatic black and white rendition of a scene that looks so everyday and boring in colour.</p>

<p>Currently, most of my photographs of people outdoors, and flowers are in colour whereas many indoor scenes and landscapes I do in black and white. For architecture most are in colour but there is some black and white also that I like do.</p>

[keith selmes]

<p>Blues with a feelin',<br /> that's what I have today<br /> Blues with a feelin',<br /> that's what I have today<br /> Been doin' cyanotype,<br />could be the right way.</p>

<p>I wonder if thats colour or B&W ? certainly mono.</p>

<p>Really it depends on the image and subject, colour often is a distraction, especially where there are strong shapes and lines, but sometimes the colour is the image, take it out and the result is very bland.</p>

[rossb]

<p> Currently I shoot Elitechrome, Kodak VC and T-max. I have T-max in my N80 currently and I am going to follow that up with another roll. But then back to Elitechrome for a while which is probably my single favorite film.</p>

[simon_crofts]

<p>I rarely like modern b&w photography. Roger Ballen being an exception. Or Sarah Moon. Like most people, I went through a b&w phase, it's something you just have to do at some stage, but nowadays I have to admit I find it a big turn-off, unless the photographer really is good enough to overcome my prejudice.</p>

<p>I think the problem is that b&w is generally an attempt to be retro - to recreate the feel of past great photographers. If I want the look of past great photographers, I want to look at past great photographers, not people who copy them. With current day photography, I'm more interested in people trying to do something innovative or new.</p>

<p>Then again, b&w isn't nearly as much as a turn off as HDR, or a Schindler.</p>

[sarah_fox]

<p>Interesting question, Rizwan! Back in my childhood and teen years I shot 100% B&W merely because it was the only thing I was equipped to process. Then in college and early family days, I shot 100% color, because I no longer had a functional darkroom, and color processing was much more available to me. Now I have a choice.</p>

<p>I now have a preference for B&W wherever I can make it work. It gives me a lot of freedoms I don't have with color, especially the license to use unconventional contrast curves, sometimes with shifting of hues and mild negative contrasts of some color channels. Modern postprocessing capabilities make the old colored filters seem quite primitive. I think 90% of my people photography has become B&W now, just because of my ability to draw out good skin tones and minimize color distractions. However, B&W is also so much more permissive than color, as I'm able to dull and darken individual elements of a photograph merely by changing their hue and saturation prior to grayscaling (a technique I've only recently discovered).</p>

<p>On the other hand, many images are about the color or require color to be intelligible. Much of landscape photography is this way, in which there are greens in complex patterns, juxtaposed against browns and reds. These are often hard to separate and contrast in B&W photography. Indeed, contrasting these colors is the very reason we humans have blue cones. (Long story.)</p>

<p>All in all, I suppose I'm running about 50:50 color and B&W. B&W is always much more fun for me. Among other things, I have several B&W's of flowers and 1 B&W sunset. ;-) As I discover more and more techniques for contrasting colors, I think even more of my photography will be B&W.</p>

[patricklavoie]

<p>i shoot everything in color and transfer it after in bw depending of my mood, the mood i want to create and the image itself.</p>

<p>Most of my images are bw from the past years.. i like the feeling of it when printed and framed.</p>

[lex_jenkins]

<p>Mostly b&w with film because that's what I've used for years; and mostly color with digital.</p>

<p>I'm leaning more toward converting digital to monochrome because my color perception isn't very accurate with skin colors. Occasionally I'll look back at color photos I took months or years ago and realize they're too magenta, cyan, etc. Easier to just convert to monochrome unless color accuracy isn't critical for a particular type of photo. Wasn't a problem when we had local pro labs to do my color film processing and printing for me, but they're gone.</p>

<p>I might have invested some philosophical or aesthetic significance into my preference for b&w years ago, but now it's mostly habit and convenience.</p>

[lachaine]

<p>Whoever you people are, mostly johnny-come-latelies I suspect, I use B&W because I like it, like most people who use it do. I have no illusions about being "artistic" or "retro" or imitating any past great photograper. I liked B&W when I started photography as a teenager in the 1960's with medium format and Polaroid, I liked it when I started 35mm photography in 1975, and I still like it today. That doesn't mean I never do colour. It depends on the subject, or the kind of photography I want to do when I set out to do it. But B&W is always my real love.</p>

<p>There's no knowing how anybody else perceives light and colour. I just know how I see it, and what I see are shapes, contours, textures, shadows, slivers of light, etc. B&W sets that out in a way where I can almost feel it when I look at the picture. A colour picture of the same thing just doesn't do that for me.</p>

[simon_crofts]

<blockquote>

<p>Whoever you people are, mostly johnny-come-latelies I suspect</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Probably, whatever that means.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>I use B&W because I like it, like most people who use it do. I have no illusions about being "artistic" or "retro" or imitating any past great photograper... B&W sets that out in a way where I can almost feel it when I look at the picture. A colour picture of the same thing just doesn't do that for me.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>That's the great thing about photography, we can all have our own opinions and likes and dislikes. I find b&w inherently backward-looking, other people may not, or may even like to look backward. There's probably not anything wrong with copying styles of photography from the past either for that matter. But I don't have to like it, or look at it. The same goes for stamp collecting and probably all other hobbies for that matter - there's nothing wrong with it, but I don't want to have to look through people's stamp collections.</p>

<p>But I can still appreciate great b&w photography when I see it. Though often can't help secretly wishing the photographer had tried colour.</p>

<p>I think some people use b&w because it's safer, there's one less variable to play with, and they can do more extreme manipulations to the image (dodging and burning, variable contrast, suppressing distracting colours of details) without it being so obvious to the viewer.</p>

<p>I was recently discussing this with a quite well-known photojournalist, who uses b&w along the lines of the 1970's Leica aesthetic, who was expressing a fear of photographing in colour - she really wanted to try colour, but was afraid that it might not work. There is a perception that colour with its extra dimension is more difficult than b&w. She emailed me some pics from a new series she was trying to do in colour, and the results were great, better than her b&w work.</p>

<p>When b&w work is well done it can be fantastic. I was looking at the winners of Prix Pictet - the b&w project about water is absolutely awesome. On the other hand, the colour images by Nadav Kander were even more awesome.</p>

[sarah_fox]

<p>Interesting sub-topic about B&W being used to imitate great photographers from times past. I've been on a very long trip that has taken me through high-profile landscape destinations such as Yosemite. I've done photography in Yosemite, and some of my photography has been of water against stone, which contrasts beautifully in B&W. So when photographing Yosemite, should I avoid the use of B&W because my work might be confused with Adams'? After all, it's somewhat difficult to do B&W photography in Yosemite and not look at least a bit like Adams, at least if the tonality of one's images are good! Large format would complete the picture! It's certainly not my intent to imitate anyone. However, must I carefully alter my work to avoid confusion with past photographers? Must I avoid photographing things MY way because it looks a bit like someone else's way? Wouldn't this be as silly as altering my technique so as to imitate someone?</p>

<p>Although I don't agree with Pierre in tone (e.g. "mostly johnny-come-latelies..."), I do agree that it's OK to do things the way we want to do them. Yeah, I like B&W too. Just do.</p>

[simon_crofts]

<blockquote>

<p>should I avoid the use of B&W because my work might be confused with Adams</p>

</blockquote>

<p>You should take the photographs the way you want to, that's a given. However, for it to be interesting to others, it should have the stamp of the photographer's own approach on it. There's nothing wrong with taking b&w images in Yosemite. It would be hard not to be heavily influenced by AA. But if the photographer brings their own unique vision to the table and the pictures are brilliant and original, then the photographer done good. If they look like an attempt to re-run what AA might have done (and having an especial interest in tonality sounds suspiciously like it may be heading in that direction), then - "next"!</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Wouldn't this be as silly as altering my technique so as to imitate someone?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Yes, it would be as silly. The ideal is to do your own thing. Which includes ultimately making your own mind up whether to partially accept or wholly reject what anyone else thinks, including what I think.</p>

[vincent_peri]

<p>I shoot about 2/3 color, 1/3 b&w film. I really enjoy B&W and should shoot more, but too many photos are just better in color. My opinion only.</p>

[AJHingel]

<p>I'm a digital photographer. Whether the final image is B/W or color depends on the photo and/or my mood.</p>