Before digital, choosing B&W over color was a conscious and predetermined choice. You decided what you wanted and picked your film. The digital revolution has changed all that. With a few exceptions, all digital cameras capture color images. They generate images that exceed the quality of 35mm film and rival medium format and also offer the ability to choose B&W over color. So, what to do? Color or B&W? Coke or Pepsi?
I love working in B&W. As I said in my blog post on New York in the Snow, “B&W is just more subtle and interpretive than color photography. B&W images are not direct renditions of their subjects, but are abstractions from reality, representing colors in shades of grey. Wikipedia. B&W captures the essence of a scene, the very feeling of a scene without the distraction, the baggage if you will, of added color. The eye is free to see the substance of the scene without being overwhelmed with color."
B&W also is associated with a certain look, a certain era of class and elegance. Although I love B&W, I think this association is really mistaken. It’s based on a misremembered, supposedly better era that was mostly photographed in B&W only because color wasn’t available or was prohibitively expensive. B&W was almost exclusively used until the 1970’s mostly because of cost. Put simply, it was cheaper to shoot and process B&W than color. As a result, B&W is associated with a certain era and a certain look, all of which say older, classic, and documentary.
This started to change in the cinematography during the 50s and early 60s. In the 50s Color at first was used only for truly gigantic spectacles like Ben Hur while B&W was used for everything else. By the 60s the relative use flipped, so that color was increasingly used while B&W was starting to be reserved for more serious movies. This pattern repeated itself in photography during the 70s, an area that brought the advent of cheaper color film and processing. Because of this, color is a medium that is also subconsciously associated with the crazy, creative, out-of-control 70s and the more moribund 80s and so lacks the classic feeling of B&W. By the 80s color was easily available so what you carried with you determined the look of your photos and sometimes even what you could photograph.
The digital revolution changed all that. As I said above, with a few exceptions all digital cameras capture color images. So, this begs the question, When do you use B&W? When do you use color?
For me, the answer is pretty simple: While I convert nearly all my photos into both B&W and color, B&W is in my mind the default choice. This is the case because I shoot people and I excel in shooting them with their guard down. Whether shooting for fun or on assignment, my subjects are almost always people caught in candid moments. It is these moments that are much more suitable to B&W.
B&W removes the distraction of color from the image. It enables the viewer to see the person in the image as the person actually appeared, without the distraction of make up or background colors. In this sense, the B&W photos depict the real not the superficial.
The image of Janeve and David is a great example. I photographed their wedding this past November. This image was shot at approximately 8PM, after they had been working on the wedding preparation most of the day. They must have been tired by this time but this photo, taken after the ceremony, shows the happiness in their faces -- the ceremony is over and it's off to the reception. While their joy is obvious in B&W, it’s a look that might have been lost in a sea of color.
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