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.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.
Consider how is that the brain ends up working that way. After all it is an evolutionary process.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.
Why characterize it as rabid insistence? Clearly the proposition has strong support, but rabid insistence? Why the demonization?HOWEVER, how does one explain the rabid insistence of the power of B&W. As I have said, it is all through this site.
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.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.
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.Why characterize it as rabid insistence? Clearly the proposition has strong support, but rabid insistence? Why the demonization?
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?Color vision had to evolve along survival modalities.
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.This is an exploration around why people are so impacted by B&W.
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.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.
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
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.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.
A since I did not have the book there was not much to say.
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. .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 think that is an excellent clarification of your initial question.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.This is an exploration around why people are so impacted by B&W.
Ordered the book. The process of seeing is always a part of my courses.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.
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.It's even possible that the physiological aspects of perception have little to do with impact./
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.
I agree. It's also why 3D movies aren't so popular. They distract from the story line.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.
... or anesthesia...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.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.
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