Greyscale (Black & White) Versus Color With Illustrations From The Olmos Basin

I have done black and white film based photography ever since I was given my first camera over fifty years ago. I have also done color photography, but black and white will always be my first love. Unfortunately, since switching to digital about five years ago, I have done very little greyscale.

There is a different mental process for digital versus film that I think favors color technique. There is also a different visual process when taking photos for color versus black and white. I have done assignments where I have been shooting in both black and white and in color film, switching from one camera to the other, but I have never been quite satisfied with the results on those occasions.

The emphasis in color photography is on the psychology of color. A photograph that is predominantly bright primary colors will not only have a different look than one with pastels or earth tones, it will have a different feeling for the viewer and a different interpretation.

On the other hand, a black and white photograph is a higher level of abstraction than a color photo. In black and white the emphasis is on shape, line, form, texture, lighting; the basic visual elements of the black and white photograph.

Some subjects are better suited to color because the color provides a fundamental and necessary component of the interpretation. Other subjects lend themselves to black and white because the color is either secondary to the interpretation, or in many cases, distracts from the desired interpretation.

All but two of the photos I have posted on this blog thus far have been color. Following are a series of photos I took in the San Antonio River headwaters woods in Olmos Basin in 2004. They were originally taken on film and later scanned to digital. Notice how texture and line predominate in these images, elements that may have been visually suppressed and gone unnoticed if they had been color images: