Illuminating imagery.
Between 1968 and 1976 I photographed mostly in black and white because that’s what I could afford. Black and white photography can be more challenging than color since the impact of the image depends wholly on its composition and tonality. But I think this “limitation” also creates a more direct emotional connection between the image and the viewer.
So, I’m experimenting with B & W versions of color images I shot during 2016. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.
While Big Sur may be more famous, the Sonoma Coast, some 80 miles north of San Francisco is just as wild. To my mind, there is no more dramatic meeting of land and sea. Plus there are redwood … [Read More...]
I took a day trip with a group from St. Luke's Lutheran Church in Middleton. We rode the bus through pouring rain for a while and two and a half hours later arrived at the autumnal beauty of LaCrosse, … [Read More...]
The differences among seasons are much more obvious in Wisconsin than in California. Winter is brown or white; spring is light green; summer is darker green; fall is every color. The photos in the … [Read More...]
I think B&W, because it is associated with old photos immediately lends a kind of historicity to any such photo, which generally, but not always, also gives it a dignity that it might not otherwise have. Its artificiality relative to the verisimiltude of color photos also gives it the cachet of art quite readily. I think also the landscape photos here recall the iconic photos of Ansel Adams, again touching back to an earlier era, especially for those of us , I suppose old enough to recall the near-ubiquity of Adams’s images in our culture and so we can’t not see echoes of Adams’s work in such pictures.
Which is a very nice way of stating the fact that we’re old, Andy! I’m not consciously thinking about Adams, much less his zone system, when converting color images to B&W, but I take your point.