I’m falling in love with black & white photography again… thank goodness! Not that I ever fell out of love. You see, I’ve been trying to work with different ideas and approaches or techniques with colour images and in particular with the use of HDR. And recently, I have been spending a bit of time working on an hdr image I took in Maui of a sun setting behind the island of Molokai. I tried different processing and interpretations, but I could never find a “look” for the image that I was pleased with. I knew that I had a well composed image and from a technical point of view, the hdr was ok. I was having trouble with the colours. That’s the problem with hdr, oversaturated colours are an easy trap to fall into if you’re not careful.Throw in a bit of colour blindness and that trap becomes an ever deepening well. I was becoming frustrated.
As I said above, I never really fell out of love with black and white and hopefully you will have noticed the odd smattering of b&w photographs scattered around this blog. However, I am getting a bit frustrated with my attempts at colour photography so I am going back to the medium to which I can trust my eyes (and hence instinct). As I process a colour image I’ve always got this nagging devil on my shoulder screaming in my ear “That’s too much green! Look how deep your reds are! You don’t know the difference between them do you? Ha, ha!!” With B&W it’s (mostly) all about tonality, composition, tonality and composition. Also, and this is on a personal level, I find it much easier to have an emotional reaction with a b&w image than a colour one. Maybe ‘easy’ isn’t the right word. I’m just more predisposed to be drawn into a black and white image than a colour one.
Well, for a while at least, that little guy on my shoulder is going to have to p!$$ off while I go and get my mojo back.
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