Black and White

There are a lot of variables in photography—maybe that's one of the reasons I enjoy it. The complexity of picture taking helps ensure that photographing the same subject several times never really returns the same result.

I'm mainly a colors person; I enjoy color and in proper combinations I find it compelling and striking. That said, I'm also a fan of geometry (the only math I ever did very well in, and incidentally the best graphics course I took in my CS degree). I realized recently that there are two primary reasons that intro photo courses don't use color.

First and foremost, I think it's because photo courses still expect you to know your way around a dark room, and color development is expensive. Second, color is an added variable that distracts from composition (just like zooming in my experience). Many of the rules of composition (rule of thirds, leading lines, basic shapes) have more to do with geometry than they do with color anyway; as soon as you throw color in the mix, you've added a significant complexity that distracts from the basic elements of the picture.

So I decided to go "color fasting" awhile ago to see if I could learn anything about image composition. I doubt I did. I did, however, find that there are some conveniences to black and white, even in the digital world, that help improve shooting conditions. And given proper subjects, black and white is compelling.

Looking first at subjects:

24mm @ f/2.8(?), ISO 1600, 1/60s

The D40 isn't known to have great high-ISO performance, being a 1st-generation camera, and typically it would show very prominently in an image like this (especially when cropped from the original). Noise, however, becomes a lot less obvious when shooting black and white. This permitted me to capture the Psychic Reading neon without too much extra difficulty.

Some people really dislike noise—one of the features of the newer cameras is that they have very good performance in low light, sometimes pushing ISOs to unheard of levels (25600? higher? really? It seems ludicrous!). But I find that in black and white photography, noise is actually often an enhancement to the artistic qualities of the image. I shot the following originally in color:

50mm @ f/1.8, ISO 800, 1/320s

It was a bit blurry and needed to be sharpened. While the ISO performance here was pretty good, as soon as you start applying an unsharp mask or something similar, you'll find that it picks out the noise fairly quickly. In a color image, this is fairly distracting, but in black and white it looks like film grain, not like randomly spewed color noise.

I suspect that biologically we're more attuned to differences in hue than we are in value. That, combined with the eyes' natural Gaussian-type filter, may account for the reason that noise is less distracting in black and white than in color.

Another feature of the black and white here that you don't immediately appreciate is how it obscures the terrible lighting in the gymnasium. The white balance is extremely difficult because of competing light sources (fluorescent lights above, sunlight from the outside windows, and a few incandescent sources, too), and the D40 is usually poor with white balance (another post for another day). I made a quality 8x10 of the processed image.

24mm @ f/?, ISO 400, 1/80s

This last photo (at least for the time being) is one of the other prints I've made from my color fast. I'm not sure it's a particularly good picture, but if anything makes it compelling, it's probably that it's black and white. My theory is that color in general detracts from geometry, and therefore from texture (keeping in mind that texture is not a specifically geometrical property of objects; lighting has a great deal to do with how we perceive texture also).