Now I understand there may be a generational gap at work here, in the sense that for a generation that came of age with the computer, it does make sense to think "does this look better in colour or in black and white," because it grew up with the knowledge that there is a "colour on / colour off" switch that one can use at will (which of course holds true for the older generation who adapted, by choice or necessity, to the new technology). This is not a critic, just a reminder that technology has an influence in how one thinks — even creatively. Here too we are dealing with the knowledge and understanding of the possibilities of the medium. Just differently.
No, that I agree you make a choice and you stick with it. What I am saying is that nothing prevents you from presenting that photo In B&W for another audience/occasionYou are the artist. If you present your audience with a color photograph it’s not very inviting if you state that is could also be a B&W one.
ThanksAudience for photographs are extremely impatient and will grant you on average 3 seconds attention. So pic your battle wisely. If I look at your picture en try to contemplate what you are telling me the color of the leaves pinpoint me to the autumn season. For me that season is the periode where trees transcend from cauliflower shapes to graphics formed by tree branches and trunks. This notion of transition strengthens the two tree trunk forms that form the frame of the picture. That’s for me a nice aspect of this picture.
That is not a ship it is the road below the park. Not so relevant I agree with the rest of the image but I wanted to get the silhouette of the left tree trunk in the imageWhat I don’t manage to comprehend is the building on the left side with the ship in the background.
I also notice that your style mimics the style what is usually described as pictorialism. I’m not very fond of that period of photography. I like to think that photography can stand its own and doesn’t have to mimic an other art form.``
So, yes the technology had dictated the use of black and white vs color in the past.
What about now that the majority of new generation chooses to work with digital where by default we are "forced" to choose color as a primary medium (forgetting the Leica/Pentax monochromes). What should the correct approach be?
Many digital cameras, including the one built into my phone, allow the user to take black and white photos. No post processing is required to remove color.
Perhaps this is simply a language issue, but do you consider anything that you don’t like to be “bad”? Your dismissal of individual photos and entire photographic styles in this thread are hard to get past.
Many digital cameras, including the one built into my phone, allow the user to take black and white photos. No post processing is required to remove color.
Light and most natural scenes are “RGB” also.
So, yes the technology had dictated the use of black and white vs color in the past.
What about now that the majority of new generation chooses to work with digital where by default we are "forced" to choose color as a primary medium (forgetting the Leica/Pentax monochromes). What should the correct approach be?
Dictated is too strong. There were — and still are — many factors at work.
Nobody is forced to choose. Through the viewfinder, everything appears in colour, whether you are using colour film, black and white film, or a digital camera. The differences lie in how you look at the scene, in how the scene looks to you photographically, and, later on, in the process.
When Koudelka switched to a Leica digital panoramic camera, he was still seeing in black and white, and still expecting a final result that was in every way similar to the one he had on film. The difficulty became — not for him, but for those who handled his digital files — to find a process that made it so his photographs looked like what he expects a Koudelka photograph to look like.
I've never read anything about his passage from film to digital, but I suspect the same could be said of Richard Misrach, this time in colour.
There's no "correct" approach. There's how you see the world, there's how you see the world photographically, and there's the process that's going to take all that and translate or transpose it into a photograph.
It's very simple, which doesn't mean that it's easy. Making a good photograph is extremely difficult.
That is not a ship it is the road below the park. Not so relevant I agree with the rest of the image but I wanted to get the silhouette of the left tree trunk in the image
I also don't like pictorialism and I prefer clear description. I guess the movement of the wind and the long exposure contributed to that effect
Basically do you say they are mistakes ?
So you're OK saying something like this about someone when they're not around, but you wouldn't say it to their face?
What I meant about the process is that how do you evaluate your photos afterwards?
To me this sounds patronising.
What I meant about the process is that how do you evaluate your photos afterwards?
You evaluate them in color (as they come from your digital camera)? And you later decide whether they work better in color or B&W?
Or you play the game (which is what I was mostly skeptical about throughout this forum) that you switch on/off between color and B&W and decide accordingly whether to keep them or not?
N79, there are many photographers still who do not use digital cameras.... by the old method of "previsualization".......they imagine the printed image in bw.
Embracing digital in my view involves having all those benefits and flexibility that the medium to exploit in any way you want. For some, this may involve leaving the LCD on the backside of the camera off and going about the process similarly to how one might do it in the darkroom. Some shoot in color and know they want to end up in B&W and know exactly where they want to go with that. Some shoot in color and decide afterwards based on the image in a process of evaluation and reflection how the image works best. That, and about a million other approaches. With film - same thing, just a whole lot less flexibility. The dogma isn't ingrained in the technology. It's in our brains, and the nice thing is that it's not hard-wired. We can get rid of it. It hurts a bit at first, and then it's like a breath of fresh air.the ones who wanted to embrace the digital era and suddenly face this dilemma.
Yes but these photographers have already made the decision before hand carefully and with thought when they rolled the film into the camera.
I am asking more about the ones who wanted to embrace the digital era and suddenly face this dilemma.
N79, there are many photographers still who do not use digital cameras.... by the old method of "previsualization".......they imagine the printed image in bw.
They are also 3-dimensional should we print in 3-d then?
Sorry I don’t understand. Way isn’t it possible to previsualise when using a digital camera ? It seems to me rather counterproductive to just take some random shots and look afterwards if you had some luck.
When scouting for my landscape locations I often don’t even take a camera with me. Or just stumble across a nice location doing something different and come back later to take the shot.
The context was a bit different, but I'll always remember something that my Dad said to me.
"There are far more really good photographs taken with Instamatics than all the fancy SLRs and expensive rangefinders put together".
While that was about camera equipment, it is true about photography in general.
Photography aimed at the artistic impression market is an inconsequentially tiny niche within a far larger, far more robust communicative human endeavour.
It is an interesting niche, but still a tiny one.
And whether or not something is successful in that niche has almost nothing to do with whether it is good, bad or mediocre.
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