Although I’m not a big fan of digital manipulation and do almost none to my images, I make an exception when I convert colour images to black and white. To my eye, some scenes just look better in monochrome.
I have always thought of black and white photography as an abstract medium and colour photography as a psychological medium. American photographer Elliott Erwitt said, “With colour you describe; with black and white you interpret.” So, there is more left to the imagination and perhaps more attention paid to graphic details.
When I first heard the version of Kodachrome on Simon and Garfunkel’s The Concert in Central Park, I realized that the lyrics had been changed from the original. According to Songfacts Simon sometimes sings the line “Everything looks worse in black and white” as “Everything looks better in black and white.” He changes it a lot, and claims he can’t remember which way he wrote it.” Neither is better, just a different view of the world.
I used to shoot my digital monochrome images using the b&w mode on my camera until I saw a documentary on Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama. He was going over images on the computer with his assistant and telling him which ones he wanted to be converted to black and white. I started shooting everything in colour and doing the conversions later–it leaves more options. If it’s good enough for Daido Moriyama, it’s good enough for me!
Here are some recent photos that I have converted.
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Great. The first Dartmouth pic is fantastic!
Thank you, Robert. Sometimes all of the elements appear at once.
These images are descriptive, they were nice in color. In mono they feel broody to me. But it was probably your intent when you made conversion.
I have different reasons for converting the images, Often they are just lacking in colour, but sometimes the tones or graphic elements are better suited to black and white. I find that b&w images with lots of dark tones are inherently broody or gloomy.
A comparison of the original colour photo (though I believe I have seen some of these in colour previously) alongside its BW conversion would be interesting.
Further discussion of your conversion process would also be interesting. I have my own conversion process by working in the Lab colour space and ending up with a greyscale image (rather than RGB).
You probably know about Lumiere’s autochrome process introduced in 1907 – about 30 years before its time. At the time, colour was considered to give an unacceptable bias in that it encouraged people to focus on appearance rather than on reality. So it never caught on as “pure” documentary format – especially in the media. I find it interesting that BW is now considered abstract, and colour descriptive.
Nice to hear from you, Bob. My conversion process is far simpler. I go into Picasa and press a button. After that I might tweak the contrast. I think that because b&w was so dominant for so many decades, it became the definition of documentary, art photography, portraiture–just about everything. It is possible that cost and impermanence played a part in holding colour back. William Eggleston really made colour a legitimate art form. Is it more descriptive? That’s a good question! I think it has more of an impact on our psychology than black and white.