monochrome vs color. reasoning (with examples)

I love color photography... but I love black and white photography too! Color images could not (and are unlikely to be able in the future) to kick out completely black and white ones. Why? and where is the room for using one or another kind? Thats a good question! And the answer is not as obvious as it seems ... I answered it for myself apparently so.

When poor (or incorrect) lighting does not benefit the image, does not provide delicate contrasts and rich play of color, or does not make the color muddy at all, this is a direct candidate for conversion to black and white. Why does the picture need a bad color, from which it will not get anything? Excluding fuzzy color (which in this case only distracts), we highlight the most important details in the image, focusing on the main thing.

Exploring urban architecture on a cloudy day.

Sometimes it happens so that most of the meaningful information that allows human eye and brain to identify an object, lies precisely in color. Without color - there remains an incomprehensible contour that does not speak to the spectator, since it does not tell his brain anything interesting.

Below is a good example; which version will you choose in this case - color or monochrome?

Guess what it is? A mutagenic orange, maybe? no....

Just a lamp on the fence, an indicator of attention to ongoing construction work.

The situation changes when the picture contains whimsical textures or some kind of stuff that can "feed" the brain, even if it is not a valuable story in itself. For me, these are usually some curious textures ...

By the way, our human brain is trained by evolution (thats the way it works) to find meaning in any noise, to highlight meaningful information mixed with garbage ... even in cases where there is not any of it at all ! (Remember the famous Rorschach test?) In any detail, we first tend to guess faces, thats a basic pattern.

The human eye sees the surrounding world in color; thats why a monochrome picture - in contrast with all-time multi-color background involved - is automatically highlighted. Monochrome is always an abstraction that is very different from everyday reality, thus it makes us give a start, stop and pay a especial attention. Perhaps due to this such images can evoke a stronger emotional response.

Look at the shadows...

When the color component of the visual component is removed, our eye switches to a different mode of operation and begins to search, recognize, "decipher" the meaning based on black and white contrasts. Now our brain receives "its food": some ratios of black and white, heavy and light, whimsical curvilinear forms, and so on.

Picking of information, its evaluation, analysis, highlighting the accents - in the case of monochrome image, this goes not the same way as in usual situation.

Unlike the picture above, which was significantly improved by hand, this is an automatic black and white conversion of what the camera saw (by the way, the frame was shot against the light, manually, and generally turned out to be overexposed). Why did I add this (unfortunate) version here?

It is supposed as an illustration of idea that 'black and white' (monochrome) visuals do not necessarily gain their value automatically, no, no: they gain value only with certain qualities, namely: contrast, the ratio of black and white areas, interesting textures. To me this is a fundamental issue, I refuse to applaud photographs that gain nothing from a trivia automatic photoshop B-W image conversion.

And a few more illustrations below.

Sugar cotton candies. Unbreakable!

Which version you would prefer here?

This frame does have some pretty colours, contrasts and nuances. Convert them into B-W, and they momentarily got lost - giving back... what? almost nothing. Most of details are quite tiny here, providing a little or no contrast at all. This case is obvious for me, I would go after colours. And what about you?

Does these dirty shades have any appeal to you? Solution is pretty obvious here: I eliminate colours, getting a nice monochrome.

location:	St.Petersburg, Russia	2022-2023	natural light
camera/lens:	Canon 5D	various	raw-conv

All images taken by me, copyright (c) @qwerrie

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