srt101fan

Many interesting, informative, thought-provoking and much appreciated comments in this thread. Shows what a varied and robust community we are – many different views and approaches with well expressed supporting commentary. Too many comments to address individually, but I want to thank all who participated. Much fun and photographic stimulus for the old brain!

I will confess to a Black & White photography bias. Never very good at it, but had my own little darkroom, Beseler 23-C enlarger (never got a color head for it!), bulk film loader (usually loaded with Tri-x), occasionally a few rolls of Plus-X or Panatomic, and my Minolta SRT-101 with a 1.7 lens. Those were the good old days.

Somewhere along the line I stopped using the darkroom. The reasons included eye issues (cataracts) and increasing frustration at not getting the kind of printing results I wanted (moving software sliders around is cheap, using lots of photo paper is not!) I tried slides and color negative film, but for whatever reason, my venture into color photography was pretty much a disaster. But now I’m happy with digital! Haven’t gotten too much into B&W conversion but I will. I have my camera set to shoot RAW + JPEG. The JPEG is set to B&W – a way to help visualization and learn.

But, but…... after reading all your great commentary, I still wonder: if you made up a list of the, say, one hundred most memorable, iconic photographs ever taken (I know, it’s impossible, but they do it all the time with books and movies!), how many color images would make it onto that list…….?

Thanks again, y'all, for a stimulating conversation.

tommystrat Loc: Bigfork, Montana

Agree emphatically!

dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

I am in favor of simple tests. Like how to answer the question "Should I wear a man bun?" The test is "Is your name Toshiro Mifune?"

If you do not get it, you are not a classic film fan.

mwsilvers Loc: Central New Jersey

Yep. Unfortunately, a number of older black and white films are being colorized to appeal to a modern audience. My 29 year old son, who is a film buff, thankfully has no interest in colorized versions of classic films.

dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

And, hopefully, not interest in a man bun. They just look silly on anyone else.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Color inkjet prints made on archival materials with PIGMENTED inks can last over 200 years in dark storage, according to Wilhelm Associates, a well-known industry testing firm. That compares with 20 to 40 years for the vast majority of silver halide chromogenic color prints.

Black-and-White inkjet prints made with PIGMENTED inks on archival papers can last about as long as traditional silver halide B&W prints. Like silver grains in gelatin emulsions, pigments are solid, and unless exposed to significant heat, light, or other radiation, they are relatively stable. Just think about the pigments used 30,000 years ago on cave walls in Europe! Because gelatin isn't involved in some archival papers, they are even more stable under controlled storage conditions.

Since digital files are just bits and bytes, they can live forever, with no degradation, provided playback devices that can decode them are around, OR provided that they are copied forward from older formats to newer formats every few years.

Bipod

Exactly: each medium is different. You can't watercolor in oils, you can't oil paint in watercolors.

Ansel Adams did a lot of color work, especially for Arizona Highways magazine.
But before his death he burned all his color negatives.

We have such great color in digital cameras -- but monitors and printes are a nightmare:
every one is different. Hardly anybody bothers to calibrate their monitors.

Heraclitus said "you can never step in the same river twice" but today you can never buy
the same camera or printer twice -- at least the firmware has changed, and probably the
hardware. The only way to find out is to look at the rev. number on the PC board and
check all the component values. Inks are constantly reformulated -- a lot more often
than films were.

And the companies making printers are not Leica or Hassalblad---they are big electronics
companies that don't understand the special needs of photography (such as permanence
and repeatability).

But a Besseler enlarger absolutely is designed and built by Beseler -- with the needs of
photography in mind. The enlarger market is driven by knowledgable and demanding
customers. Who knows and cares more about photography: Beseler or Lenovo/Epson/HP
(and whoever is building printers for Canon)?

So the only recourse is to keep using the same camera and printer--which is fine until
it dies (and no one can fix it). With film cameras, the camera didn't matter so much--
you could load your favorite film into any camera and get the same color. And
cameras lasted for decades and just about anything that could go wrong could be
fixed.

Adams always preached repeatability It should be easier with digital, but it's a lot
more difficult because you're always dealing with new equipment. At the same time,
there has never been less variety in camera designs and formats. Shorter model life,
more frequent changes, less real choice. (Anyone who doubts this should shop for
twin lens reflex, a press camera or a view camera.)

You can make your own oil paints, but you can't make your own digital camera.
So if the industry can't produce suitable tools -- if the only affordable cameras are
miniature format -- then there will be very, very few people doing photography
at a high level.

SteveR Loc: Michigan

That's not what he meant by hot and cold. Color provides much more information than b&w to our senses. When our senses are not overloaded with information, our brains and imagination heat up. Perhaps the best example of this that I could think of is old radio shows where the listener had to fill in the action with his or hers mind's eye. Mcluhan broke this down into his famous catch phrase, "the medium is the message."

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

McLuhan was not being literal about that... He was being allegorical. He was alluding to the effect of choosing a particular medium to convey a message, and the amount of mental effort required to absorb and process and retain it.

A medium is not a message. The contents of the message (its meaning) are (is) always the message. But just as tone of voice (inflection, volume, urgency, speed) colors meaning, or "set and setting" influence mood, so can the ways messages are transmitted via images or sound or text. They influence interpretation, but not real meaning. The meaning is in the intent of the sender. The sender's choice of medium MAY influence correct interpretation, but it need not. Senders have responsibilities to convey messages in ways that are congruent with their intended meanings. To do otherwise is to elude communications.

Bipod

That image is absolutely lovely. Terrific atmosphere and composition.
(And you can't buy a lens from Nikon or Canon that will take a photo like that.
The Leica Thrambar-M 90 mm f/2.2 portrait lens would, but it's too long and too $$$).

With so much talk about contrast, it's really great to see how effective and
beautiful a low-contrast image can be. It's a real photograph.

Bipod

That's a great example of the power of B&W: there is nothing in that image
--in the foreground or background--to distract from the structure of the tree.
It's graceful lines contrast with the bleak winter scene. Nothing gets in the way.
It's simple, at the same time its evocative. It says something that cannot be easily
paraphrased and could mean different things to different viewers.

There used to be subtle use of color, but that's pretty much gone. Computer
printers removed the limits on saturated color--like lithography on steroids.
Now almost every image one sees looks like a dimestore litho postcard -- with
colors that only exist in tropical fish and Xmas tree lights.

mwsilvers Loc: Central New Jersey

While we have disagreed on other topics, I agree completely about the current trend of oversaturated images with too much vibrance, over sharpening and excessive contrast which look more overcooked than the already excessive images in most travel brochures. It reminds me of the excessive use of adjustments in my other hobby, high end stereo where some people turn the treble and the bass way up towards the maximum mostly because they can, not because it serves the music better. Many people just do not understand moderation and subtlety. If a little sharpening is good, a lot of sharpening must be better, right?

SteveR Loc: Michigan

In other words, some media provide much more information than others, like color photos, whereas black and white conveys much less information, requiring the viewer to iinteract and fill in information not provided....which is what makes b&w film noire movies so "cool" so to speak.

Of course the medium is not the message, but it shapes our perception of the message. Both Mcluan and Hollywood were/are very much aware of that.

User ID

No doubt true. But toadally beside the point.
Read the thread title. Read the OP.


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User ID