Black and White
A photographer I met recently, Laurence Winram, uses low saturation color in many of his photographs. See examples here. Last week, he'd commented on some of my photos, which prompted me to see what they looked like with less saturated color. As an experiment, I went all the way and made one of the images black and white. Laurence liked this, which encouraged me to try it with a few other shots from my Thailand trip. In some, I prefer them to the color versions, sometimes not. In the end, I put five of them on my website, but also wanted to talk about them here.
In painting, one of the first things any student learns is the importance of controlling tone in their images. This is easier said than done and many never fully master the skill. In my case, I don't think I had learned how to do this until I was in my late thirties. In photography, one might think it is an easier problem because the camera should be able to capture whatever tones are in front of it, but to control them for artistic effect is another thing. As I was thinking of this, I was reminded of the photographer Jason Bell, who has several very strong black and white images on his site. Indeed, my favorite image on his site is black and white (a portrait of Emily Blunt) although he has many beautiful color images as well.
Below are the images that I think were improved by changing them to black and white, alongside their color versions for comparison. To see the images at full resolution, just click on them.
This image replaces a horizontal shot that I also like, but suspect isn't as strong as the black and white image here. For comparison, it is below:
In painting, one of the first things any student learns is the importance of controlling tone in their images. This is easier said than done and many never fully master the skill. In my case, I don't think I had learned how to do this until I was in my late thirties. In photography, one might think it is an easier problem because the camera should be able to capture whatever tones are in front of it, but to control them for artistic effect is another thing. As I was thinking of this, I was reminded of the photographer Jason Bell, who has several very strong black and white images on his site. Indeed, my favorite image on his site is black and white (a portrait of Emily Blunt) although he has many beautiful color images as well.
Below are the images that I think were improved by changing them to black and white, alongside their color versions for comparison. To see the images at full resolution, just click on them.
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