Thinking in BW (updated)

Steve Hynes, UK veteran photographer and writer and editor for photo magazines wrote to me:

You have touched a chord with me. Having shot extensively in both colour and black and white, I have always found it best to avoid doing both in the same session because they are mentally very different processes.

Since shooting digital and effectively having both types of film in the camera all the time, I now find myself visualising each situation for what it might make. Occasionally an image not visualised as black and white has made a great black and white conversion. Serendipity.

While on a press trip with some magazine editors I was shooting on a dull day that was going to produce flat and uninteresting colour, but I could see some nice black and white. One guy asked why I was bothering to shoot because it would be crap. I explained that I was shooting for black and white. He said 'why would you want to do that'. Perhaps that's why the magazines are so bad these days.

Steve Hynes

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I was asked: why do I want to shoot in BW, when it's so easy to change in the computer later?
Well, look at one of my fave pics from this summer:


... It should be obvious to anybody that these are two very different pictures indeed. If the BW version is exciting at all, it's certainly in a much more subtle way than the color one.

See, if I were walking around with, effectively, "color film in my camera", it would be nearly impossible for me to not notice a great color subject like this.
In other words, if I'm trying to think both in color and in BW at once, I'm not thinking very clearly in either.

But if I were shooting only in BW, and especially with a BW screen on the camera, I would be thinking only in BW, and color would be tuned out of my mind to a large degree, and I would notice subjects and pictures I would not have otherwise.

I would notice that some subjects, like shown above, would not work in BW, and perhaps more importantly, I might notice subjects which would work in BW, but would not work in color because of a distracting color contrast. If my mind was "half set in color", I would not have been able to see past that distraction.

Also, in black-and-white, one tends to work much more with the light to differentiate the objects in the photo from each other, because one does not have the colors to do it. (Notice the amazing work with light in some old BW movies.) One needs to think differently, much more in lines, contrasts, and grey tones, than one does when working in color.
They are really two different art forms, but at the same time have too many things in common for one to work well in both at once, they get mixed up.

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Update: Jon Barry produced for me this different version by making the red darker and the green lighter (a similar effect to having a green filter on the lens with a BW film). Which goes to show that you do get more flexibility by capturing in color. And that, true enough, "color contrast" which would not normally show in BW can be approached in tones.