In low light we see only black and white.

[Berkeley Mike]

Now we're getting somewhere.

 

[RalphLambrecht]

Does that effect how we experience black and white images?

Possibly;sometimes, we seem to imagine colors even if they are not actually shown in an imagine.g.apples,trees or grass.

 

[pentaxuser]

Now we're getting somewhere.

What is this a reference to. A previous post I imagine but which one and what is it about that post that gets us somewhere. It is clear to me that most of us if not nearly all of us have failed to see what you are driving at. The discussion is not going the way you thought or hoped it would, so at the risk of appearing to lead us, you might want to say what the real kernel of this thread is about.

pentaxuser

 

[Theo Sulphate]

So low-light vision is also low contrast, is it not? Yet I prefer higher than normal contrast b&w images.

 

[Vaughn]

... So, our most substantial experience seeing in black and white is, statistically, in low light.

Perhaps -- but most of that time is spent sleeping. Time awake during darkness would be by a fire...with light giving things color and/or a warm tint. It would be meer assumption that our distant ancestors' night vision is similar to what we have now. One theory is that the discovery of fire created the possibility of brain growth in our human ansestors. Cooked food can provide significantly more energy and nurtients than the equivilent weight of uncooked food...energy we needed to feed larger brains. So it is possible our brain development ran parallel to a reduced need for night vision -- thus leading us to a higher developed color vision and reduced B&W night vision than our distant ancestors.

So, are those of us who excell in B&W photography more primitive genetically?

 

[pentaxuser]

So, are those of us who excell in B&W photography more primitive genetically?

Interesting idea. Can they also walk silently by retracting their claws? Sorry Mike - just a bit of repartee while we wait for your help to keep this thread on track

pentaxuser

 

[tedr1]

Things have to get pretty dark for the loss of color to occur, examples are not difficult to find where color persists at low light levels, for example at night the dull red of fire embers can be perceived long after the bright yellow flames have gone.

I am not sure I agree that the only experience of "monochrome" in early evolutionary time would be low light vision. For example in full sun where contrast is high and extinguishes texture and detail what remains may be only simple shadows and outlines of a monochromatic nature. Marks made in daylight on certain surfaces, for example animal tracks in sand, are essentially monochromatic. Marks made with charcoal on pale surfaces are monochromatic.

Mammalian visual perception is incredibly versatile and quick. In real-time the visual fields are processed for shape, line, color, surface, volume, reflectance, object range and tracking motion compensation, etc. I like to think of this as a set of simultaneous multiple signal processing tasks that are carried out in parallel. The system seems to be highly versatile and adaptable to many different environments and different mammalian survival strategies. I recall reading reports where the presentation of a photographic portrait to a member of a primitive tribe having no prior human contact produced astonishment and bafflement, but not failure of the visual system.

It seems unlikely that encountering a black and white print for the first time would challenge the mammalian visual system into failing to register the ambient light level in which the picture is being viewed and cause it to abandon the signal processing strategy appropriate to that light level. It seems likely that a visual system with that vulnerability might have other perhaps more serious flaws and prove unviable.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Chariatures and seeing figures in clouds and being able to define things with just a few lines shows the brain's ability to cull info from little data. Regarding color vs black white, I seem to recall there are different cones and receptors in the eyes for both types. The color receptors are not stimulated in low light anymore than digital sensors are. However, the BW receptors continue to work with low "photons" albeit with no color. Color have a smaller range in frequency. Plus, if we only had color receptors, we'd be totally blind at night.

 

[Berkeley Mike]

The point is trying to understand something that has not been determined. You guys are so set on finality and a final answer. This is a classic photographers characteristic recognized by psychodynamic measurement for at least 70 years. It can be hard to step out of that; you all get uncomfortable if you cannot come to some absolute measurable thing and control it to a result.

Read the site and see how much you hear how absolute B&W is, how it is a truth or absent that, that as an experience it is something metaphysical, beyond understanding, or even magic. There has to be some ground in between. I am trying to explore that through the talent and experience on this site. I see some pretty rigid thinking and a lot of avoidance and dancing around with small exceptions and immediate denial.

This is not easy. Reactions are shaping the question. As the pages add up, this will change. Now is skirmishing which will evolve to brainstorming and maybe opening minds.

Does our black and white rod-oriented experience, the major b&w experience in our entire existence, underpin our photographic experience in B&W?

 

[Berkeley Mike]

Things have to get pretty dark for the loss of color to occur, examples are not difficult to find where color persists at low light levels, for example at night the dull red of fire embers can be perceived long after the bright yellow flames have gone.

I am not sure I agree that the only experience of "monochrome" in early evolutionary time would be low light vision. For example in full sun where contrast is high and extinguishes texture and detail what remains may be only simple shadows and outlines of a monochromatic nature. Marks made in daylight on certain surfaces, for example animal tracks in sand, are essentially monochromatic. Marks made with charcoal on pale surfaces are monochromatic.

Mammalian visual perception is incredibly versatile and quick. In real-time the visual fields are processed for shape, line, color, surface, volume, reflectance, object range and tracking motion compensation, etc. I like to think of this as a set of simultaneous multiple signal processing tasks that are carried out in parallel. The system seems to be highly versatile and adaptable to many different environments and different mammalian survival strategies. I recall reading reports where the presentation of a photographic portrait to a member of a primitive tribe having no prior human contact produced astonishment and bafflement, but not failure of the visual system.

It seems unlikely that encountering a black and white print for the first time would challenge the mammalian visual system into failing to register the ambient light level in which the picture is being viewed and cause it to abandon the signal processing strategy appropriate to that light level. It seems likely that a visual system with that vulnerability might have other perhaps more serious flaws and prove unviable.

Don Juan said to look into the shadows.

 

[MontanaJay]

In high-G flight maneuvers one of the ways the brain attempts to retain consciousness is to shut down cone receptors as the brain's blood supply drains. That shifts vision to black and white and tells the pilot to ease up because he's nearing total blackout.

 

[Mr Bill]

Hi, I'm not getting what it is exactly, or even roughly, what you're really trying to find out. Or if you just want to have some back and forth exchanges.

At any rate, since you didn't respond to the book recommendation I made, let me say that the author is a neurobiologist. Here's an excerpt from the website:

https://neuro.hms.harvard.edu/people/faculty/margaret-livingstone

A side interest in the lab is to use what we know about vision to understand some of the discoveries artists have made about how we see. The separate processing of color and form information has a parallel in artists' idea that color and luminance play very different roles in art (Livingstone, Vision and Art, Abrams Press, 2002).

The book, written for the general public, discusses some aspects of our vision that one would likely not guess on their own. Again, no direct application to photography (that I see) but perhaps useful in gaining a further understanding.

 

[removed account4]

Perhaps -- but most of that time is spent sleeping. Time awake during darkness would be by a fire...with light giving things color and/or a warm tint. It would be meer assumption that our distant ancestors' night vision is similar to what we have now. One theory is that the discovery of fire created the possibility of brain growth in our human ansestors. Cooked food can provide significantly more energy and nurtients than the equivilent weight of uncooked food...energy we needed to feed larger brains. So it is possible our brain development ran parallel to a reduced need for night vision -- thus leading us to a higher developed color vision and reduced B&W night vision than our distant ancestors.

So, are those of us who excell in B&W photography more primitive genetically?

i don't know vaughn

i seem to remember the days of our ancestors being very much like what we live today

they even had b/w photography ( at the very end ) ...

 

[Berkeley Mike]

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

 

[Berkeley Mike]

Perhaps -- but most of that time is spent sleeping. Time awake during darkness would be by a fire...with light giving things color and/or a warm tint. It would be meer assumption that our distant ancestors' night vision is similar to what we have now. One theory is that the discovery of fire created the possibility of brain growth in our human ansestors. Cooked food can provide significantly more energy and nurtients than the equivilent weight of uncooked food...energy we needed to feed larger brains. So it is possible our brain development ran parallel to a reduced need for night vision -- thus leading us to a higher developed color vision and reduced B&W night vision than our distant ancestors.

So, are those of us who excell in B&W photography more primitive genetically?

This comment expressed some measure of the frequency of B&W vision and suggests the reduction of its usage.

 

[Berkeley Mike]

Hi, I'm not getting what it is exactly, or even roughly, what you're really trying to find out. Or if you just want to have some back and forth exchanges.

At any rate, since you didn't respond to the book recommendation I made, let me say that the author is a neurobiologist. Here's an excerpt from the website:

https://neuro.hms.harvard.edu/people/faculty/margaret-livingstone



The book, written for the general public, discusses some aspects of our vision that one would likely not guess on their own. Again, no direct application to photography (that I see) but perhaps useful in gaining a further understanding.

A since I did not have the book there was not much to say. The link above gave some ideas concerning peripheral vision where rods are used.

 

[Berkeley Mike]

Possibly;sometimes, we seem to imagine colors even if they are not actually shown in an imagine.g.apples,trees or grass.

In this case we are not imagining anything; the brain is filling in what it thinks we need. This mechanism is one of the many things that the brain does for its own comfort. Others are our tendency to "custom white balance", our tendency to bring our anticipations to viewing, the infilling of peripheral areas of vision with visual placeholders...ther are a lot of these.

 

[Berkeley Mike]

Charicatures and seeing figures in clouds and being able to define things with just a few lines shows the brain's ability to cull info from little data.

This is the brains attempt to understand in service of survival.

 

[Berkeley Mike]

Things have to get pretty dark for the loss of color to occur, examples are not difficult to find where color persists at low light levels, for example at night the dull red of fire embers can be perceived long after the bright yellow flames have gone.

I am not sure I agree that the only experience of "monochrome" in early evolutionary time would be low light vision. For example in full sun where contrast is high and extinguishes texture and detail what remains may be only simple shadows and outlines of a monochromatic nature. Marks made in daylight on certain surfaces, for example animal tracks in sand, are essentially monochromatic. Marks made with charcoal on pale surfaces are monochromatic.

Mammalian visual perception is incredibly versatile and quick. In real-time the visual fields are processed for shape, line, color, surface, volume, reflectance, object range and tracking motion compensation, etc. I like to think of this as a set of simultaneous multiple signal processing tasks that are carried out in parallel. The system seems to be highly versatile and adaptable to many different environments and different mammalian survival strategies. I recall reading reports where the presentation of a photographic portrait to a member of a primitive tribe having no prior human contact produced astonishment and bafflement, but not failure of the visual system.

It seems unlikely that encountering a black and white print for the first time would challenge the mammalian visual system into failing to register the ambient light level in which the picture is being viewed and cause it to abandon the signal processing strategy appropriate to that light level. It seems likely that a visual system with that vulnerability might have other perhaps more serious flaws and prove unviable.

Interesting. Vision in the peripheral areas responds to major structures, and this is demonstrated by the full-sun model you propose.

 

[Berkeley Mike]

In high-G flight maneuvers one of the ways the brain attempts to retain consciousness is to shut down cone receptors as the brain's blood supply drains. That shifts vision to black and white and tells the pilot to ease up because he's nearing total blackout.

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.

 

[tedr1]

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.

 

[pentaxuser]

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

Well some are not. My grand-daughter tells me that grass isn't grey and points out other things that are "wrong" My wife associates B&W with the kind of "made do and mend" philosophy that prevailed in the U.K. in the 50s and was still prevalent on the 60s when people took B&W because colour was not always that good and was certainly very expensive. That is no longer the case so she wonders why anyone bothers with B&W.

I suspect that if colour had been invented first then B&W might never have arrived. I also wonder what the sales of digital cameras would be like if they could only record things in B&W

I happen to think that a few scenes/ things do have more impact in B&W but this may be in compositions where the real impact of B&W is that colour adds nothing to it and in terms of impact I am in a minority of one in my social circle.

pentaxuser

 

[Theo Sulphate]

...I also wonder what the sales of digital cameras would be like if they could only record things in B&W

I happen to think that a few scenes/ things do have more impact in B&W but this may be in compositions where the real impact of B&W is that colour adds nothing to it and in terms of impact I am in a minority of one in my social circle.

pentaxuser

The Leica M Monochrom [sic] is a b&w-only digital camera and it has been selling quite well. So Leica believed that b&w only was important enough for a product and a good number of photographers agreed.

 

[Vaughn]

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

Thanks for finally making that clear. That is a far more of an expanded topic than you first presented.

We have none to very few rods in our fovea (central vision area directly behind the lens). They predominate the peripheral of the fovea. So our ability to see B&W in low light is a peripheral thing. Do not look directly at want you want to see in the dark. Now does that affect how we approach B&W images -- by looking not directly but in a round-about way?

 

[faberryman]

I think some of us "see" in black and white better than color. Most of my work is in black and white (though toned, lith, or platinum/palladium). I think it is more successful than my color work. I doubt it has anything to do with rods and cones. It is probably more an aesthetic temperament.