Saturday, February 15, 2014

Color or Black & White?

Believe it or not, that's a question that I ask myself a lot these days. I always thought that color way the only way to go. I mean, black and white existed only because we didn't know how to capture color at the time, right? Wrong!

While color captures a lot of information, I'm learning that black and white captures a lot more imagination. The interplay of light and shadow tells the story in black and white, where different hues tell the story in color. Is one "better" than the other? No. Both have their strengths (and weaknesses). One of the many joys of digital photography is that it's pretty easy to convert from color to black and white, so you can look at a photo in both and determine which works best. Here's an example where I preferred to use black and white:

Here's a dark green Nova on an overcast day, in color and in black and white:
 
The grey, overcast skies make the color copy seem flat, but they look right at home in black and white.
 
Try it sometime on a few of your photos. You never know, you just might wind up with something you never knew you had...Remember, if you're not having fun while you're out shooting, you're probably doing something wrong.

 

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