Re: OT: Black & White or Colour?

Chris Malcolm wrote:

That's me then. Very much like B&W in poor light conditions like
caves. Colour will be crap anyway unless you have *serious* flash
power (which you won't, as a snapper), black and white simply works
much, much better in that sort of place IMHO.

That's an interesting view, but it's completely at odds with my
views on low light. I actually love low light and long exposures,
and am frequently amazed at how much colour there is in a scene
which seems to lack it.

Depends on whether you regard the colour in a scene as a property
given the scene by our eyes, or whether you regard it as an intrinsic
property of the scene imperfectly measured by our eyes.

That's the big question, isn't it? What is colour anyway? Is it how we see
it, or how the camera sees it? The thing is, with digital cameras we can now
manipulate colour balance. This option wasn't available with film cameras,
when most of use generally used film which was balanced for "daylight".
Nowadays a lot of people leave their digital cameras set to "auto", which
really annoys me because it make the colour incredibly inconsistent from
shot to shot, and it also tends to ruin sunsets by compensating for the very
colour cast which makes sunsets so appealing in the first place!

So what is the correct colour?

Some people get very obsessive about this, but I'm now of the opinion that
there is no correct colour, it's all a matter of perception, and personal
choice. I took some late twilight shots of Neath from a mountain top once.
It looked okay on daylight colour balance, but when I changed it to tungsten
it totally transformed the scene, giving the sky an amazing blueness and
making it look much more like I imagined it should look (I can't remember
exactly how it did look).

Some scenes, particularly at twilight, have a very strong blue cast. This
makes them look very cold and dark. Is that correct? It can be corrected and
then it looks more like daylight, except that there's something obviously
wrong about it, since it doesn't look like that in the middle of the day. I
think the bottom line is that in photography, it's an artistic decision.
Once you get into the realm of strange or unfamiliar colour, it's really
down to what kind of artistic interpretation you want to give it, rather
than what the "correct" colour of the light arguably is.

School physics
teachers often get confused by that question. For example, the fact
that mixing yellow and blue gives us green isn't a physical property
of the electromagnetic spectrum, it's an illusion foisted upon us by
the our three-colour-filter approximation to true colour
vision. Mixing blue and yellow probably wouldn't fool a goldfish,
which has extremely good colour vision.

So are you saying that a goldfish would see blue AND yellow? Rather than
green?

In other words, we don't know what green looks like? Fascinating...

The question is whether one is trying to take photographs of the
world as we see it, or of the world as we could see it with different
eyes.

Galen Rowell often pointed out that to take great photographs, you need to
learn how the camera sees the world, as opposed to how we see the world. Of
course, being a film photographer he always loaded up daylight balanced
film, and he always held up the original image (the slide) as his baseline,
to which his prints were calibrated. Yet his originals may not have been
accurate in the first place.

Ultimately, does it really matter? Who cares what reality looks like anyway?
Where is it written that a great image has to correspond to reality? So long
as it's good to look at, who really cares? Apart from journalists and
forensic photographers.

At the end of the day, my primary goal is to create the best looking
images, without them looking overtly unrealistic. Does it really
matter whether those photos correspond to what we actually see?
Ansel's great landscapes obviously don't look like how we see those
places in reality.

But they might correspond to how we see them in our mind's eye, or how
our mind's eye once prompted is capable of seeing them.

Another valid point. After getting into photography I soon became sensitised
to small changes in light levels, so as the sun passed behind a cloud I
could see the light level dropping by a stop or two. Likewise I became more
sensitised to colour casts, and I started to notice the orange colour of
indoor light as I entered a room straight from an outdoor situation. Not as
strongly as the camera sees it, but I did start to notice these things. Now
I can see blue shadows on snow on a sunlit day, which I never really noticed
before. Once you know what colour these things really are, it's easier to
see them, but still not as well as a camera does.

Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/weblog/


.

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