Black and white photography is where I started, developing and enlarging in my parent’s basement. What is the enduring allure of black and white?
I came across this article by Julie Powell, and think it summarizes well why black and white continues to be so popular, even today with advanced digital cameras, editing software and everything else we have at our disposal.
Julie has, of course, a good point with black and white’s “timeless” appeal. It is the beginning of photography, indeed it dominated well over the first 100 years of photography. That means black and white made quite an imprint, and that’s something many of us have ingrained in us.
Another point Julie brings up is “focus on form and texture.” I love color as much as the next person, and color can make or break a photograph. But I also love how black and white scales things back to the essentials, form and texture, if you like.
When I wanted to get my photography going many years ago, after a period of hardly taking any photos, I started a daily photo blog. Every day I posted at least one photo of the city I lived in then. They didn’t necessarily have to be shot that day, but at least one should be posted.
I decided that it should only be black and white pictures, and I shot JPEG in camera, to take away the temptation to post a color photo. It was back to my photographic roots, and I kept it going for about a year and a half, and it got my photographic interest going again, which was the whole point.
Do you do any black and white photography? If so, do you shoot black and white in the camera, or convert in the computer?
