Re: Why B&W?

Paul Bartram wrote:
Surfing through picture sharing sites like Flickr, PBase and Smugmug, I can't help notice that a lot of people post what would otherwise be pretty good photos in Black and White. Why do they do that? Do they think it automatically make their work 'art'?

Don't know about you, but in 30 odd years of film and digital photography I've never felt the urge to take a colour negative or capture and desaturate it in an editor. It's like turning down the colour on your TV, or pulling several spark-plug leads off a Ferrari!

Opinions?

Paul



Short answer: Why not?

Long answer: Your comment about TV immediately brought to mind a classic movie from the late 1940s: Carrol Reed's The Third Man. I tried to imagine that film in color and it lost all its dramatic impact to me. There are many other examples from both movies and still photography. I have never seen color pictures of scenes that Ansel Adams used that had anything like the impact of his BW images. There are many spices and seasonings in any good cook's kitchen; imagine the food from any cook that used only one of those in every dish he/she prepared--for instance, eggs with cinnamon, green beans with cinnamon, etc--no salt, no pepper, nothing but cinnamon. Cinnamon is a fine spice (one of my favorites) but hardly applicable to all dishes.
Allen
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