In low light we see only black and white.

[Billy Axeman]

Black and white photography is about patterns, structure, minimalism and contrast. In those cases color is a distraction and you can improve the image by leaving it out.

Nothing magical, it's how your brain works.

 

[Vaughn]

Mike, from how I understand him (and can be totally wrong), seems to be interested in the first reaction/perception of an image -- that moment between receiving the light into one's eyes but before the stimuli (light) is analyized by ones brain. What 'presets' do our brains come with that will have affect on our perception in that short period of time? And how to use that moment as part of the image.

Black and white imagery has been with us for a long time -- light and shadows of petroglyphs, and monochrome pictographs come to mind, and of course writings on various substrates. It is how we have seen in the dark for a long time (but I have seen no info/evidence relating to the structure of the eyes and its capability from archeological studies. We do not know for how long we have been seeing the way we do.

 

[Berkeley Mike]

The details of how systems respond to emergencies and partial destruction as in the example above is interesting but I'm not sure about the relevance of it to perception of a monochrome image under normal, ie non emergency, conditions. Some systems fail gracefully, some become disorganized, I think the transient loss of color vision under G stress is unlikely to have relevance for the subjective experience of monochrome images under non-emergency conditions. My reason for saying this is that the only way for mammalian precursors to experience anything other than 1G was to fall, out of control, something mammals have evolved multiple clever ways of avoiding, and something having intense aversive quality that seems unlikely to be associated with transient changes in visual perception during the event.
Monochrome is not all that weird, as I have tried to show in some examples earlier. In the history of human mark-making, of which black and white prints are a recent type, the use of single pigments in cave art and object decoration were, and remain common, to judge by examples that have survived into modern times to be documented, I'm thinking of the earth pigments yellows and browns and reds, and charcoal from burned wood. In art class the first task assigned was the placement of three black circles on a white rectangle of paper, an exercise in the subjective experience of 2D space and the interactions of boundaries and tone masses, color was not involved. This is graphic art #101. Perhaps it would be a good subject for some beginner photography tutorials?
We live in a age where color reproduction is now trivial, every smartphone and flat-screen display does it very well. It was not always thus. The first printed book (c1450) used black ink letters on vellum pages and this monochrome scheme remains the norm for text, however that first bible was graced by the addition of hand made adornments around the body-text that are in color and very beautiful. Machine color printing for book and magazine trades may be about 100 years old, color TV is about 50 years old. Color is the new kid on the block. We have been seeing things in monochrome since the dawn of time.

This is wonderful and informative. Consider; black ink on vellum wasn't a choice but a consequence of a limitation. From then on whenever color was an option it was used. It is much the same today.
HOWEVER, how does one explain the rabid insistence of the power of B&W. As I have said, it is all through this site.

 

[Berkeley Mike]

Black and white photography is about patterns, structure, minimalism and contrast. In those cases color is a distraction and you can improve the image by leaving it out.

Nothing magical, it's how your brain works.

Consider how is that the brain ends up working that way. After all it is an evolutionary process.

 

[faberryman]

HOWEVER, how does one explain the rabid insistence of the power of B&W. As I have said, it is all through this site.

Why characterize it as rabid insistence? Clearly the proposition has strong support, but rabid insistence? Why the demonization?

 

[Berkeley Mike]

Mike, from how I understand him (and can be totally wrong), seems to be interested in the first reaction/perception of an image -- that moment between receiving the light into one's eyes but before the stimuli (light) is analyized by ones brain. What 'presets' do our brains come with that will have affect on our perception in that short period of time? And how to use that moment as part of the image.

Black and white imagery has been with us for a long time -- light and shadows of petroglyphs, and monochrome pictographs come to mind, and of course writings on various substrates. It is how we have seen in the dark for a long time (but I have seen no info/evidence relating to the structure of the eyes and its capability from archeological studies. We do not know for how long we have been seeing the way we do.

The first "eye" seems to have developed about 500,000,000 years ago. Prior to that it is suggested that light sensitivity of a surface patch was the eye's origin; it was either light or not, sun up or not. Hardly Technicolor. Color vision had to evolve along survival modalities.

 

[Berkeley Mike]

Why characterize it as rabid insistence? Clearly the proposition has strong support, but rabid insistence? Why the demonization?

Easy fab-man, folks here simply seemed to not consider the strength of the devotion to B&W; a forest for the trees sorta thing, even denial. It wass a purposeful overstatement, an artistic license.

 

[Dali]

The power of BW comes from the fact that color is not required to recognize what is around us. Being blue or red, a car is still a car. If BW photography prevails among amateur photographer, it is because of its convenience compared to color photography. I doubt it has to do with evolution. 99.9% of the time, I see in color (0.1% is for deep sky astronomy) and I only print BW. Am I in trouble?

 

[pentaxuser]

Color vision had to evolve along survival modalities.

Why hasn't it developed in all except the higher primates? Did it have evolve for the higher primates survival as in "have = must" or was this just happenstance?

pentaxuser

 

[Ces1um]

This is an exploration around why people are so impacted by B&W.

I've read somewhere that people like black and white images because the colour system of our vision/brain requires more energy to process. By viewing black and white images it requires less effort/energy and our body loves saving calories. Not sure how true this is, but it seems slightly plausible.

 

[MattKing]

Easy fab-man, folks here simply seemed to not consider the strength of the devotion to B&W; a forest for the trees sorta thing, even denial. It wass a purposeful overstatement, an artistic license.

I think that, with respect to Photrio, this simply represents the fact that a fair number of people here are motivated by B&W, are good at dealing with it, and don't work with the same depth and breadth of techniques when they work in colour.
If you go to a site with a bunch of people who make pottery, don't be surprised when lots of them like beautiful glazes.

 

[Theo Sulphate]

Why hasn't it developed in all except the higher primates? Did it have evolve for the higher primates survival as in "have = must" or was this just happenstance?

pentaxuser

Only the higher primates had the brain capacity to allow for the "luxury" of color. I know dogs and cats have extremely limited color vision; I presume even lesser animals have only B&W - and limited acuity as well. In those cases, they have other sensory organs that help them adapt, survive, and evolve in their environment.

 

[Vaughn]

The first "eye" seems to have developed about 500,000,000 years ago. Prior to that it is suggested that light sensitivity of a surface patch was the eye's origin; it was either light or not, sun up or not. Hardly Technicolor. Color vision had to evolve along survival modalities.

Yes and no. Evolution is not so much a matter of a species changing to survive, but instead, of some or many members of a species already have the qualities needed for survival when a need arises. Much less "tooth and claw" than usually assigned evolution. Human color vision might just be a nice thing to have, and not a significant survival characteristic...a by-product of a bigger brain.

It would be interesting to know if they studied the cone/rod make-up of the ice man's eyes (5000 yr old frozen body found in the Swiss Alps). Not that old, though.

 

[Mr Bill]

A since I did not have the book there was not much to say.

[The book being being that of Margaret Livingstone, linked in my post #17]

This video covers some of the same ideas as the book:


Livingstone thinks that we evolved with two vision systems. The evolutionarily older system (she calls it the "where" system) is the ones that lets us see position, motion, depth, and that sort of thing, is color-blind. Later, another system evolved on top of the first, giving us the ability to see color, but mainly in a static sort of situation. This is going from my fuzzy recollection of the book, so please use either the video or the book for the more accurate info.

Like I said, I don't see any direct use in photography, but her views are interesting.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

The first "eye" seems to have developed about 500,000,000 years ago. Prior to that it is suggested that light sensitivity of a surface patch was the eye's origin; it was either light or not, sun up or not. Hardly Technicolor. Color vision had to evolve along survival modalities.

I seem to recall something I read a long time ago. That color allows us to identify healthy vs. spoiled food. Even, seeing colorful fruit more easily in the tree. We're like bees and flowers are colorful to attract them. Dogs use their noses for that as do a lot of other animals. So color isn't an imperative for them. Regarding BW, we can identify attacking lions just by seeing their outlines. Color identification isn't needed to know what we're looking at so we run away in time. .

 

[Truzi]

This is an exploration around why people are so impacted by B&W.

I think that is an excellent clarification of your initial question.

My opinion, similar to that mentioned by a few others, is that we focus on different aspects of a photo when there is no color information to inform us. Textures, patterns, geometric shapes, etc., become more important when processing the information, and perhaps it forces us to consider different aspects than we normally do. It may actually make us work harder to evaluate what we see, and may relate more to the type and "amount" of information available instead of evolutionary or low-light concepts. It's even possible that the physiological aspects of perception have little to do with impact.

A good path for exploration may be to compare full-color renditions of the same image to non-B&W monochrome images (perhaps toned B&W or cyanotypes, etc.). I want to say researchers have already addressed this somewhere, but cannot remember the details.
The difficult part would be quantifying "impact" so we can compare.

SIDEBAR: There are so many resources to learn about color vision, and some are quite simple:
https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/incredible-bizarre-spectrum-animal-colour-vision
https://www.colormatters.com/color-matters-for-kids/how-animals-see-color
https://www.beeculture.com/bees-see-matters/

 

[RPC]

This is an exploration around why people are so impacted by B&W.

I assume you are saying this from an artistic point of view. I think it is obvious the masses generally prefer color to b&w in images they see.

 

[Berkeley Mike]

You should probably have a look at a book by Margaret Livingstone, which has some interesting ideas about human vision. I won't say that there's anything directly useful to a photographer, but I found it pretty interesting nevertheless. I suspect you would also.

https://www.amazon.com/Vision-Updat...00122&sr=1-1&keywords=Margaret+S.+Livingstone

There are a handful of online videos by Livingstone that give an idea of the general flavor of the book. I should probably try harder to "sell" the book, but hey, it's not my job to try to force education onto people. Maybe if it had direct photographic application, but again, I don't think it does. The cryptic Mona Lisa smile is discussed, for example, but the "mechanism" is more applicable to a painter than a photographer. Livingstone attributes things to a difference in spatial frequencies, aka fine vs coarse detail, which a painter can manipulate. She suggests that the "smile" is seen in coarser detail, which is what our peripheral vision sees when we are looking at her eyes. But if we shift our gaze to the mouth, then we can see the finer detail there, which does not show a smile. Interesting book, to me anyway.

Ordered the book. The process of seeing is always a part of my courses.

Tuesday we did a faux night shoot during the day in a theater with theatric spots and such and black backgrounds. ISO3200 f4-5.6 1/30-1/60. When we left I had them stare at the steps as they climbed and close their eyes immediately as the left the building into daylight. I had them walk to my voice and turn in the same direction. I told them to open their eyes when I asked them, I asked them to attend their first vision.

They are used to me and opened eyes at my signal. I just said, LOOK!

What they encountered was a plaza with benches and trees and brick buildings and students and depth in lightly clouded light. They had been looking at hard light spots and thin focus in the dark. You could see them trying to grasp the event; the fluxion of adjustment of brightness, the eye seeing so much in such depth that it did not know where to rest, richness, roundness and hard lines, objects with mass, and air. This, I said, is where you will work, the problem you will solve; understanding that you don't see all you think you do, that there is far more to see than you think, and your camera doesn't see like you at all.

 

[Berkeley Mike]

It's even possible that the physiological aspects of perception have little to do with impact./

We disagree, here. Vision and seeing is far too purposeful and interdynamic of light perception, anticipation and memory to not have the impact of meaning and interpretation.

 

[Jim Jones]

Too much information can blunt the message of art. Color can be distracting. Great movies from the 1930s and 1940s illustrate this well. Those masters of cinematography staged scenes like a master still photographer would stage portraits and frame landscapes. Other artists also make more of less. A few lines of poetry can convey more than pages of prose. A string quartet by Beethoven can mean more than the staging, orchestra, and singers of Wagner.

 

[jtk]

So...in this case, as our vision starts to fail, the default is B&W, after that the brain must dedicate its resources to other processes and tunnel vision occurs, then there is blackout.

This becomes a factor in our B&W experience.

 

[jtk]

There is no such thing as "blackout" unless perhaps death. In "total darkness" our complex neurological system generates gray, an easily demonstrated reality... obvious in sensory deprivation research...much like system noise in audio. As well, our eyes generate colorful phosphenes, which we usually ignore.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Too much information can blunt the message of art. Color can be distracting. Great movies from the 1930s and 1940s illustrate this well. Those masters of cinematography staged scenes like a master still photographer would stage portraits and frame landscapes. Other artists also make more of less. A few lines of poetry can convey more than pages of prose. A string quartet by Beethoven can mean more than the staging, orchestra, and singers of Wagner.

I agree. It's also why 3D movies aren't so popular. They distract from the story line.

On the other hand, some photos are simpler with color. They help to separate out the few elements. When switched to BW, everything gets cluttered detracting from the message and main subject.

 

[BrianShaw]

There is no such thing as "blackout" unless perhaps death. In "total darkness" our complex neurological system generates gray, an easily demonstrated reality... obvious in sensory deprivation research...much like system noise in audio. As well, our eyes generate colorful phosphenes, which we usually ignore.

... or anesthesia...

I was in total blackout (underground mine with no light source at all) several times. No grey was noticed but profound experience of shooting colored light flashes.

 

[Berkeley Mike]

There is no such thing as "blackout" unless perhaps death. In "total darkness" our complex neurological system generates gray, an easily demonstrated reality... obvious in sensory deprivation research...much like system noise in audio. As well, our eyes generate colorful phosphenes, which we usually ignore.

My experience is different. I worked with high performance mountain bike racers for many years. One of my top riders started running to a physiological wall due to an undiagnosed heart condition (something that might never have shown in someone who did not have occasional heart rates above 200 bpm.) In a Championship race I had to pull him out, not easy with these hyper-competitive athletes, as he described tunnel vision and then loss of vision. This may have been a primitive description at the time as it was not a controlled setting with analysts at the ready to interpret the event.

I have personally lost vision as a youth due to a stroke. I may have been seeing something but I was so traumatized I could not have reported that to the Dr. at the time. BTW, vision returned in 3 days.