Color Vs B&W in the camera.....

[CMoore]

I realize This Is NOT anything unique or groundbreaking for experienced photographers, but i am still just a beginner.
I rarely shoot color. I have had a roll of Kodak 200 in a spare Minolta for about 7-8 months now.
I used it just yesterday to take a frame of an old sign that still holds a lot of its color.
What i noticed was....when looking through the SLR with color film, it was like i was seeing COLOR In The View Finder for the first.time (in a long time).
At first, i did not even realize it. Then it hit me, i was not thinking so much about...Light/Shadows/Contrast. I was thinking (and seeing) much more, just, about the colors of the sign.
I realized that, even though EVERYTHING in my viewfinder is always Real Life Color..... THAT fact almost goes away when i have the camera to me face (with B&W film)
I am, for lack of a better term, just a Street Photographer. In the last two years, i guess i have naturally just starting seeing in terms of how things will Look/Print in the B&W Darkroom.
No doubt this is a "normal" occurrence, but it was enlightening none-the-less. (that is actually all one word)

 

[Sirius Glass]

I can change film by changing the film backs between color and black & white. The composition helps determine whether color or black & white, and sometimes I use both for the same subject.

 

[MattKing]

It is really important (and gratifying) to be able to visualize the photographic results when you look at a scene.
But it is equally important to experiment - to try things where you don't know the results beforehand. Dare I say it: to play!
And most important of all, to look and see and experience, with or without the potential of photographic "capture".

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Street photographer with SLR... I just can't see it. I mean, I can't see the street with SLR. Color, BW. The only time I was able to see it was with tiny FG-20 and E50. Both eyes open. But 50mm for street... I'm not as good as HCB for it .
Oh, I prefer street in BW.

 

[BMbikerider]

When I was using B&W exclusively, I was always like you thinking in terms of light,shade and to some extent patterns cast by sun or artificial light. Then around 1992 I 'discovered' colour printing and to be honest my B&W views of the world depreciated and I was now looking for COLOUR. As a result my B&W efforts took a back seat and my skills with B&W printing lost their keen edge.
Hopefully I have managed to recover most of it and still print in both mediums, but now it is b&w for a meaningful image where I have make the effort and think what I am doing and colour for when I want to record something as it was when I was there. With colour it is either right or wrong, get it right and it is fine, go the other way and it is dreadful. Once I have got the colour balance correct, the temperatures under control and the developer fully replenished, for a series of prints it almost becomes boring. There is little challenge

 

[John51]

An unexposed colour neg in a slide mount is a cheap viewing filter for B&W..

 

[CMoore]

An unexposed colour neg in a slide mount is a cheap viewing filter for B&W..

.....What do you look at, through that.?

 

[E. von Hoegh]

If you really want to skew the way you visualise, use color filters on b&w. The basic rule is, they lighten like colors and darken complementaries. For instance, a red filter will render a red flower as almost white, but green moss as black, or near to it.
Blue will darken a daffodil, and render the sky a featureless white. When I started learning large format in the 80s I procured a set of filters and started using them, also some orthochromatic film. Found myself looking at things, thinking of what they would look like on b&w with this or that filter.
Some of the negatives I made using very sharp-cutting filters are almost surreal. Others are just not very good

 

[WilmarcoImaging]

Color is an additional element of the language. Learn it and it opens up your vocabulary.

 

[jim10219]

If you really want to skew the way you visualise, use color filters on b&w. The basic rule is, they lighten like colors and darken complementaries. For instance, a red filter will render a red flower as almost white, but green moss as black, or near to it.
Blue will darken a daffodil, and render the sky a featureless white. When I started learning large format in the 80s I procured a set of filters and started using them, also some orthochromatic film. Found myself looking at things, thinking of what they would look like on b&w with this or that filter.
Some of the negatives I made using very sharp-cutting filters are almost surreal. Others are just not very good

Yup. And sometimes I shoot color with black and white film. That’s how they used to make printing plates in the dark ages before computers. You just take 4 successive shots with a red, green, blue, and no filter to get you cyan, magenta, yellow, and key negatives. Then you print the key negative at around 20-30% to get a full color photo. I use this technique mainly for alternative processes like gum bichromate. What’s especially cool about it is you capture an element of time in your photo since each of the four shots were taken at different times. Sometimes the boundaries between light and shadow will take on a rainbow effect as the sun moves through the sky and effects where the border lies. You can also combine them in a computer using Photoshop. I have no idea how you’d register the negatives in an enlarged using RA4 though.

You don’t even have to use RGB and CMYK to do this. You can choose other filter/print methods if you like. For instance, you could use the old technicolor technique of just using two shots using red and green filters, and then printing with green and red layers respectively. Or you could make up your own using any combination of colored filters and printing their compliments.

 

[Alan Gales]

I think Wilmarcolmaging has it right in post #9. Shooting both helps make you a better photographer.

 

[etn]

After shooting color for most of my life, my biggest issue when transitioning to B&W was to learn to visualize things in B&W. I would "think" in color and my B&W pictures would consequently end up crappy. To me, going from color to B&W was not about learning new vocabulary but a completely different language.