Do people who take B&W photos see diferently from those who take color photos?

This is a confusing attitude to me. It seems to be akin to saying "standard lenses are old hat, we should be learning how to work with ultra wides and shoot differently"

Who cares whether a certain approach, technique, technology is old or new. I presume that most people who take up photography professionally, or as a serious hobby, want to make good photos, not restrict themselves to shooting family snapshots or holiday snaps (not to suggest that these activities aren't an important part of photography, they're are probably the most important, certainly the most common). If so, we should take advantage of anything that makes this possible or easier. Whether that be a lens, an accessory, lighting, post processing software, a technique, a style or whatever, we should be embracing the full range of possibilities.

B&W and colour photography are not competing, they are different. It doesn't matter whether colour makes a photo or absence of colour makes it, getting the result you want is the goal.

Today I received Michael Kenna's book Trees. A beautiful book full of beautiful photography. It even (bizarrely) smells good. The pictures in it are B&W; they may lack colour but they don't lack quality. It's the quality that results from the effective use of photographic characteristics that is important, not the particular characteristics employed. There are plenty of boring B&W photos and plenty more boring colour photos. They are not boring because they were shot in B&W or colour, they are boring because they are not good B&W or colour pictures.

One photographer I like a lot, the Scottish landscape photographer Bruce Percy, shoots exclusively in colour (film) but I always think that his pictures look like B&W in colour. Bruce knows how to minimise the colour palette and make use of the abstraction of line, form, tone often associated with B&W photography.

Examples here: brucepercy.co.uk/21-18#/fjallabak-2019/ It's colour, but it's so minimally colour, it's also almost B&W.

Another photographer I like, Spanish-American photographer Adrian Vila shoots exclusively in B&W digital but when I look at his pictures, I see a similar minimalist approach and simplicity of composition and tones that I see in Percy's work.

aows.co/archive/spain/galicia/a-coruna Paint Adian's work with Bruce's colour palette and they'd be brothers in arms.

Again, it is never the medium or the technique that matters, it is how those things are used by the photographer.

I don't think B&W photographers inherently see the world differently. Seeing what makes a good B&W photo, like any photo, is a skill that improves with practice. The end result may well be seeing the world differently but that's all.

I agree. The first few years I was getting my feet wet with photography, I had no idea what should or should not be converted to monochrome. I just randomly tried conversion and sometimes it worked but other times it didn't. Over time I got where I could look at a photo and think "I bet this would look good in black and white". Even later I got where I could look at a scene and think it would make a good monochrome image, visualize what it might look like and maybe adjust settings to make conversion work better.

I disagree, and I like it better in color.

Yes I still have my B&W viewing filter I got at Zone VI systems sometime in the 1970's. But that was not enough since panchromatic film at the time was not truly flat - one had to ether use it in conjunction with a yellow, minus blue, light orange, orange, light red or red filter to get an idea of how the final image negative would look.

After devoting my life to a large format and 6x7 camera, I finally developed a feel to visualize a B&W image without a viewing filter. But while it took AA years it probably took me a decade or two. Also over time the film makers produced films with better coatings that flatten the spectral response. The beauty of my Leica Q2M is I never have to worry about color and can concentrate on form, tonality and structure. I've also found that a yelloiw-orange (Wratten number 16) is on my Q2M lens most of the time. That with the underlying sensor spectral response gives a nice spectral response.

The Q2M is quite a camera.

Hi,

You know,. Now that I thought about this some, I must have learned to see when B+W or color made a shot better. Originally, I only had B+W film. So every shot was just that. Later, I could afford to have color film processed. And then I wound up with a second camera so I could have one color and one B+W.

And I did look at things and think about which I wanted for a given shot.

Eventually, it all went digital and I had a monochrome camera alongside a color one. Originally a Kodak 460 pair, but later a 660m and a 760c.

These days I have only one Df and color. I ought to think about buying a used Df and making a mono unit....

Stan

We all start somewhere, and had to learn to see B&W, so I wouldn't give up on it so quickly. You could probably accelerate your learning curve by doing the OCOLOY experiment from Mike Johnston of The Online Photographer: shoot one lens, one camera, one B&W film for a whole year, 2 rolls/week, and you'll learn how to see B&W and your lens's POV well. theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2022/03/ocoloys.html

Along those lines, learning to shoot in B&W can also help your color photography, because you become aware of luminance contrast. That's one of several ways to isolate your subject from the background for example (with the others ways being texture contrast, color contrast, the ever-popular online favorite of depth of field, and motion contrast, ie. motion blur), but there are lots of other advantages. And to do it well, I think you have to use an OVF or full-color EVF (with no exposure preview) because the ultimate goal is for you to spot a potential shot with just your bare eye, just like learning a lens means you learn to spot a good scene for it with just your eye because you can't walk around with the camera in your face all the time. And looking through a lens is also very limiting to how you assess a shot.

that would be a waist of money. if you can shoot a good colour image with contrast and detail than the conversion is easy for high quality b&w its just knowing the magic sauce recipe, and its easy 2 sliders on the 1 drop down menu.

Sometimes I plan a series of photos to be black-and-white and so try to previsualize them that way, but it is rare. Desaturation can be as much as a cliche or gimmick as oversaturation so likewise lose its power when it is overused. Black and white in photography should be less about tradition and more about intent. Compare the prevalance of black and white in photography to that of cinema, for example.

There is a series I did in 2019 that I was never satisfied with, and last month I got the idea to edit them as black-and-white instead of colour, and now the photos finally make sense. I did not envision the photos as black-and-white until 3 years later, but that didn't hurt their effectiveness in black-and-white. I actually like having the original files in colour and so have more control over the conversion.

Trick question, its colourly black and white. 😜

Also a lovely photo

Interesting. I quite admired his work when I was younger, but never did read anything on his technique. Back then, reading, at least for me, was for sci-fi.

When I took two photography courses in art college colour developing was too expensive and 'complicated' fore mere first and second year arts students. As I recall we were taught to pay attention to light and shadow and texture. Then off we went, shot some pics and developed in B&W. No fancy filters or the like.

The one perk we did have was after hours access to the dark room if we wanted to do further work. I quite enjoyed the process of film and paper development and did some crude experimentation with both film and paper developing in those after hours sessions. There was something quite magical about seeing an image gradually appear as you gently sloshed the paper around in a tray of developer, waiting for just the right moment to fix the image.

I thought I got some reasonably good results at the time.

My favourite project was creating a larger format image using a 35 mil negative. The original assignment was to use a 4x4 negative and a 35 mil negative to print on a larger format, 18 x 24 I believe. The intent was to show us the limits of the 35 mil format, but I became intrigued with what might be achieved. After the initial assignment, I spent some time doing different exposures on 8x10 paper until I got something I thought would scale without the loss of detail mattering. The result was a large print that looked a lot and old faded print from years ago. The resulting image kept the character of the street scene I chose, but shifted the focus to light and shadow and away from detail.

That print ended up on my wall for a few years as a poster.

The long and short of this story is that you do need to think a little differently about how to make an image work without colour, but I agree with Jim that it can be learned. Take lots of pics and experiment. Its so much easier (cheaper?) to do than with film.

For any photograph we take, we need to understand how the camera will see differently from our human eyesight. A fixed photographic view will not include our sense of stereoscopic vision, will be at a more limited dynamic range and will not duplicate how we view and process our visual information. Shooting in B&W adds more that we need to consider in what has been called visualization or previsualization. As with any photography it is something we learn and develop our abilities with experience and study.

BTW, there is a simple trick to help with visualizing the B&W results. Squint. That will make the color diminish or vanish leaving B&W relationships.

Hi,

Shooting with a monochrome sensor is quite a bit higher quality than shooting with a color sensor and then converting it. I found that out long ago with that pair of Kodak cameras which sported the same 6 MP sensor - one color and one mono.

And I know how to do the conversion and even mimic several different forms of B+W film. That's really when converting color to mono makes sense. When you want a particular film look. That's easier to achieve from color than from mono.

So I don't see making up a mono Df as a waste of money. I actually see it as something Nikon really ought to have done. They have both color and mono variants of the D4 sensor which they put into their microscope cameras.

As I think about it, I might pick up a used D4 and then convert my existing Df to mono. But it's probably cheaper to buy a second Df and it's likely in better shape than a D4. I'll be keeping my eye peeled....

Stan

In silver photography, each type of negative had its way of rendering in B&W each color of the spectrum, and was in the end of the era a real conscious choice. You went with Ilford fp4+ or Tmax, or else, to have that kind of rendition in B&W of the colors.

The three books of Ansel Adams (The camera, The negative, The print), even if exclusively treating about silver photography technique, explains also how one can train to envision and imagine what he/she would like to have as an end result in the print. What color/area to place in the B&w range.

I used to use green, yellow and orange filters to achieve different contrast and greys for a given color. It is a conscious process of imagination of the final B&W image, and yes this can be trained. And it is not the same as 'mmmmh, this pic is meh... Well, let's try in B&W, Low key, Hard contrast... Heyyyy great!'.

One can parallel this to know beforehand what will be the appropriate focal length for the image you want, and with it, guessing properly where to stand to frame correctly. Again, in the old days of fixed focal lenses, or even non interchangeable lenses camera (my old Rolleiflex 2.8F had only an 80mm, which in medium format 6x6 was something of a 50 to 55mm), it becomes a second nature to be at the good place to frame properly what you just saw and attracts your eye.

I think people achieving stunning B&W images are taking their images with the final expected result in mind, and this forces you to analyse your composition in a somewhat different way, light intensity, weighing shadows and highlights more precisely, geometries.

My two cents of course, but I recommend even in this age of silicon photography to read these three books, their transposition to digital photography is for me at least, still relevant.

Greg