Renae with my ancient Seagull camera.
Lately, for what might be good reason, many "experienced" photographers have rallied to the cause of damning generative A.I. all the while demanding its partial inclusion in their own post production applications. Seems they'd like just a tad of A.I. magic in their noise reduction, subject separation and content aware fill, but not so much that it might threaten the sovereignty of their own "hand-crafted" creativity. But the reality is that every move forward in technology is one more angle of "slide" on the slippery slope of change.
I've been playing around with making black and white files from modern, full color digital cameras. The lure of black and white images is strong with photographers of a certain age. And, in truth, the graphic nature of a good black and white image is alluring to nearly all lovers of photography. But the decision to completely repudiate and remove color from our tools strikes me as the height of craft folly. Sure, I get that you might love working in black and white and intend that for all your art work. In a way it makes sense. But intentionally hobbling a camera's abilities can be self defeating, especially when a color file, as a starting point, allows for the use of color channels to make a more convincing, final black and white image than one generated by a camera with a monochrome sensor. You are effectively tossing out a whole range of creative tools in order to embrace....dogma.
Many who do this think it's a way of making a stand against the forward creep of technology. That this engineering retardation of sensors will stand as a buffer of sorts against the introduction of ever newer technology which threatens long time practitioners by dint of requiring them to evolve their methodologies. Their approach to imaging. Their idea of work. I get that this can be scary. And there is a word for it. It's: Neophobic.
I've been trying out all manner of ways to get to "black and white." What I've found is that modern color cameras, matched up with current post processing tools, or even just great profile "recipes" in camera, can actually do as good or better of a job making black and white images as the cameras dedicated to just making black and white images.
I was out last week with the Fuji GFX camera and I had it set to make (very convincing) Tri-X style black and white Jpegs. The argument for having a dedicated B&W camera is that your eye and your brain, when used in conjunction with a black and white only camera, condition themselves to look only for subject matter that is considered to be appropriate for monochrome-only output. But the reality is that a lot of photography just works much, much better in color.
I would walk down the street looking for certain subjects or light contrasts, or graphics shapes and constructions and I could find them easily enough but for every cool black and white "friendly" subject I came upon I stumbled across dozens and dozens of images in which color was a significant driver of interest and overall photographic success in a subject. Should I just walk on by lots of potentially great images in order to satisfy an intellectual and arbitrary practice construction created and implemented mostly to harken back to the days in which color film was iffy and expensive, black and white cheaper and more friendly to DIY? But why? Now we can have our color cake and convert it to delicious black and white gateau as well. Double duty from one frame. Twice as delicious.
I toyed with the idea of buying a Leica M Monochrom camera all week long. One in particular was in and out of my shopping cart so often I'm assuming it developed vertigo. But in the end, after looking at my own photo catalogs, with hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of images, I found that my interest in black and white is only occasional and in nearly all cases an image I wanted to see in black and white didn't suffer from having started life as a color one. Not in the least. So, in the end, I have largely decided (always subject to sudden change) that I'd rather have another identical M 240 so I can do another last century affectation and carry two cameras around at once. One with a 28mm lens attached and the other with a 35mm or 50mm lens attached. Both set to make raw files. Both highly capable of rendering files in very pleasing and convincing black and white. No brain change required.
I'm heading out now to go one more round with the Fuji MF set to "Tri-X". It's a fun exercise. The images look very good ---- when a subject is complicit. But, I'm not locked into the B&W cult. If I see a blood red font on a bright blue sign bookended by one beautiful woman with purple hair on one side and a second women, with lavender hair, on the other side I can pretty much guarantee you that I'll be making a color shot of the scene. Just makes sense. And keeps me from developing Neophobia; at least as it regards the relentless forward march of aesthetics.
On a different note: I hope everyone had a wonderful and conflict free Thanksgiving and maybe took a moment to think about all the things they are grateful for. I spent the day with extended family, down in San Antonio and I can't imagine how the day could have been more pleasant. Even the drive down was a rare exception from the usual Mad Max nature of the IH-35 freeway. I didn't over-indulge but.....there is one more piece of rum, chocolate pecan pie in the fridge. If no one has claimed it by now it's mine!!!
I have too much to be thankful for to get it all mapped out in one blog post. Life has been mostly (almost completely) spectacular for me. Now, if I can manage to gracefully retire from working I'll have nailed it. Life is too short not to enjoy every single day. Living in the moment is a skill. I'm not perfect at that yet but I keep practicing. Not looking forward or backwards but staring into the kind eyes of right now.
Made easier with an emotional support camera over one shoulder.
16 comments:
Because I had a large set of unused Pentax glass, I went for a Pentax Monochrome, which is fun. And, frankly, that's about it. It's fun. It's even more fun than converting color to B&W. It's sort of like having a pure bicycle rather than an electric-assist bike. This is particularly true for me, because I'm not really an ultimate-quality shooter; a bit sloppy and spontaneous is fine with me. If a newspaper would print it, I'm good with it. And frankly, with that mind set, I really don't see any special quality from the Pentax images over converted images from a Nikon Z7 or a Fuji X-T5. I am told, however, that there are people who *can* see a quality difference, or who can feel an operational difference, or a psychological difference, perhaps, when working with a B&W cameras versus a normal color camera. Perhaps I'm just credulous, but I'm willing to believe them. I suspect you also feel that, if a B&W has been bouncing in and out of your shopping cart lately. To go back to the bicycle metaphor, if you were puffing up a hill and an old lady on an electric-assist went totaling past you, would you feel abashed, or actually proud of the fact that you were getting something out of the purity of the non-electric bike (that is, real exercise?) If you're out there with your monochrome, and you see somebody with a red-dot color Leica, would you feel abashed, or perhaps even a bit superior, working, as you would be, with a handicap?
Interesting challenge/response. More thought necessary for me.
I shoot with both the M240 and M246. I pick the M240 for just walking around, where I have no preconceived plan of what I may be shooting. The M246 comes into play where I am setting out to capture images that show themselves best in B&W. The lack of the Bayer Array lets my M246 resolve detail like a much higher resolution body and reveal subtle tonal differences that are not visible in my M240 shots. There is a purity in my M246 images, since every photocell in its sensor pixel maps directly to a pixel in my image. With the M240 each pixel in the image is the result of a computer interpolation of four photocells in order to produce the color information from the Bayer Array. Sort of like AI :).
Thanks JC and Luke.
I like how you give yourself an out for future impulse buys. That's life in the camera store lane, for sure. Before the internet, it was magazines pushing us to buy and buy. Now it's review sites, and each other via social media and blogs. It's very human to want neat new things, I think, and the perceived pleasure of others can lead us down some interesting consumer paths.
I don’t fear change as much as I fear my bank account balance dropping too much as I make purchases to do any meaningful change - in gear. Whether or not that gear leads to any meaningful change in my photographs is another matter.
Regarding B&W photography - I started dabbling in that a bit after I saw your posts about Montreal. I have tried capturing RAW+JPEG with the camera set to capture Monochrome photos. The RAW images are ultimately in colour. Sometimes I like the way the camera renders the tones in JPEGs. Other times I prefer Lightroom’s B&W conversion. The result is very close to what I was getting when shooting a variety of B&W film and printing on various grades of B&W paper. No special B&W camera is in my future. But I won’t think ill if someone wants such a camera. I think it’s a good thing different equipment exists for different wants and needs.
I've got a few pictures that I discovered worked better cropped differently for monochrome than for color. I liked both versions.
On the subject of Tri-X, my father mostly shot with it, pushed to a higher ASA speed. I mostly used it too when I used to shoot film. One day a few years ago I was in a photographer's studio where he had some B&W pictures on display. I assumed that they were digital color images converted to B&W. For one of them I said "This almost looks like it was shot with Tri-X. How did you do that?". He replied that it *was* shot with Tri-X.
What about three bodies? Two M240 with different primes and an M246, hanging with different strap lengths. Now that would be a last century affectation.
With the sales success of the Pentax Monochrome, there must be other dedicated B&W cameras on the drawing boards out there.
MikeR said, "So, instead of railing against the bloggers and vloggers who publish camera reviews while not actually using the camera,"
Is it okay with you if I do both? Cuz I will anyway.
And yes, I was alive and working back in the 1990s. I remember the drill back then.
Another thought on this interesting topic. I don't really find B&W all that compelling, except in one area -- portraits. Doesn't even have to be portraits of people. I took a few shots of two horses the other day, and I was really struck by the qualities that B&W gave to them. But human portraits almost seem to exist in another dimension. My favorite photo of my entire life is a B&W portrait of my son as a toddler. Since you are the local portraitmeister, you might think about that, as well.
By the way, in my first reply today, the word "totaling" appears. Originally it was tootling, which the spellchecker once again, one second ago, tried to change to totaling. I don't even know what totaling means. Is this our AI future?
YES... to the "acoustic" bicycle AND ... to the e-assist bicycle if you have the $. If you don't have the $ then do the acoustic bicycle or wait and buy an e-assist bicycle when the time is right. Same for cameras! But you do you! Do what's best for you not what silly people like me :-) suggest.
Hi Kirk. Your arguments in favour of having a colour, instead of monochrome, camera in hand, would also apply as arguments for having a zoom instead of prime lens on said camera. And I think it’s a pretty decent argument!
Cheers
Arg
I also prefer to retain the option to render an image in B&W or in color, or even in both, post capture. For those who prefer to "see" in B&W I have to ask the question - how did you manage "seeing" in B&W before the advent of the EVF? Optical viewfinders can only display color. And most of them with poorly rendered images at that (optical distortion, rangefinder overlays, focusing prisms, on ground glass inverted or reversed L to R.
I only have color sensors on my cameras. In post I like adjusting Luminance for individual colors, darker greens for example, brighter warm skin tones, or darker blues. This has numerous artistic opportunities for B&W images. If I had a monochrome camera I would need a set of color filters for the lenses. And I’m not sure I need improvements in tonality and sharpness. BTW, I add a very slight warm tone to my images. Anyone else do this as well?
I suffer from the "this image doesn't work in color, maybe I can save it by converting it to B&W" syndrome. For the most part, I have a really hard time shooting and seeing in B&W if I'm looking through a color viewfinder. Thankfully my Fuji allows me to see B&W through the viewfinder when I change the in camera simulation to B&W.
I also believe that portraits are better in B&W (at least 90% of the time). Back in the day I loved shooting portraits with Ilford Delta 3200... love the big fat grain!
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