Black and white images are becoming a new old obsession for me. When I was a young photographer, I only shot in black and white – rarely color. Everything and anything that had light falling on it was fair game as subject matter for a black and white photo back in the day.
Fast forward almost fifty years (hey, I started young) everything is in color now. I don’t know what it was that sparked my renewed interest in black and white photography or, in turning my color images into black and white images. Washing them of their color. Taking them down to the bare bones of light, dark, and structure.
In the analog days, whether an image was in color or in black and white was predetermined by which film I had in my camera. Which was usually a roll of Kodak Tri-X film. I liked the potential of its contrasty and grainy nature. That also went for which ASA (usually 400, as I rarely pushed the film) and which lens I was shooting with (I only had one, a 50mm). Sorting these things out was so much simpler back in the day – compose, line up the line in the circle, focus, shoot. Over expose, under expose, and another directly between the two to start. Once I was one with the camera, I could experiment a little more with exposures and shutter speeds. Now we have so many choices for shooting and decisions to make for each and every image.
It can be mind boggling.
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The image above was shot in color, with a point and shoot Canon camera – the first one I had as my personal digital test camera back in 2005. I had taken it on a two-month trip to France and a few other places to experiment with, to see if I wanted to make the switch permanent. I was smitten with the technology, I admit. I really didn’t mess with the settings much, and literally did, just point and shoot. I loved the instantaneousness of seeing an image immediately after I had taken it. I wasn’t wasting film – I was only filling up space. All the images were in color.
It was the way of the New World.
Yesterday I was editing the color version of this image, as I am re-editing my stock library for consistency’s sake. It’s of three chairs I found in Château de Fontainebleau, bound in plastic and individually roped off. I had been taking a lot of chair images on that trip, many of them triplet or twin sets of chairs as well as clusters, as France seems to have about a hundred chairs per citizen just laying about in public places. Because of that, people tend to just sit in a chair if they need to rest their feet, and so many of the chateaux have original antique chairs just laying about, it can become a problem. (I was really lucky that Napoleon’s throne was roped off from across the room … I really wanted to sit in it.)
Anyway, the thing that I liked about this image when I took it was that each of the chairs had been individually wrapped up in plastic and tied off with a thin rope, yet they were just sitting there together in public view, like a set of triplets. The light in the room wasn’t that great, and the chairs were being backlit a bit from the window, but I took the photo anyway, as a memory notation.
So back to yesterday. This photo came up next in my editing queue and I ran the above story through my head as I was editing the color version. For fun, I switched it over to black and white, as I have been doing often as of late. It had a quality to it that reminded me of my old black and white work. The window light being a bit overblown, a little grain throughout, and not being able to find a sharp crisp hard edge to anything.
I think that stock photography has given us a false sense of what perfection is in a photograph. In stock photography, a photo is unacceptable if it is soft, or overblown, or just not sharp enough. Therefore, so many of the images you see out in the world are judged by these standards. But photography, like art, and fiction, and cooking, and so many other things in life, is subjective. It’s not the photographer’s job to spoonfeed you their idea of perfection. It’s up to the viewer to decide for themselves if it moves them, if it is worthy of being printed, if it speaks to them.
By today’s standards this is a crap photo. But I like it.