Color or Black and White?

Hello

the color pictures are better and nice

Bye

Markus

Posted by Markus on January 04, 2009 at 12:52 AM JST #

I think the people pictures are better in B&W but the places pictures look better to me in colour.

Posted by Simon Phipps on January 04, 2009 at 01:11 AM JST #

The problem with digital black and white is the way we make it. Channel mixing, desaturate o straight from the camera give very different results.
I prefer in B&W the #4 and #9, for example.

Posted by paurullan on January 04, 2009 at 02:27 AM JST #

I always go back and forth on color vs b/w. I can never decide and it drives me nuts. I find b/w a great deal harder to get right. These images and the previous few posts from this trip were all shot with a little point/shoot in jpg. I generally shoot in raw, which requires a fair amount of post-processing but also offers a lot more flexibility. So you need camera skills and photo editing skills. At least it`s more fun than film, though. God, I hated film. :)

Posted by Jim Grisanzio on January 04, 2009 at 02:48 AM JST #

I like the pictures very much: since I am not able to go to Japan on business, this shows me what Japan looks like rather than the stock photos. Also you and some are making itch to buy a camera to take my own pictures again. I always thought black & white had a context in which to place the subject matter. Like the picture of Kijima, forth from the bottom: nice composition for a b&w photo works for me pretty well. Also the one of Zenkoji, very nice!

Posted by Robert J on January 04, 2009 at 04:10 AM JST #

To be true I love the results of film but digital is way easier.
By the way, did you know that you can extract the thumbnails from raw files to get a medium quality jpeg? These can easy lot of headaches in a moment of haste. Check dcraw manual for «dcraw -e» if you use dcraw.

Posted by paurullan on January 04, 2009 at 04:19 AM JST #

In the black and white pictures that splash of red doesn't even begin to stand out and move to the foreground.

alan

Posted by Alan Pae on January 04, 2009 at 05:33 AM JST #

b&w for me. colour is so much harder to get right...

i'm shooting almost exclusively b&w film at the moment, not just because i can develop it myself, but because ir's a simpler space in which to focus on composition.

Posted by Jon Ellis on January 04, 2009 at 07:56 AM JST #

I see so much more in the b&w ones. The color is distracting on most of the pictures, it draws the eye to the colorful thing and you miss what else is going on in the picture.

Except the picture of the two straw sandals, I love the colors on that one. Pleasant, not distracting.

Oh, and - akemashite omedetou gozaimasu! Kotoshi mo yoroshiku! :)

Posted by melanie gao on January 04, 2009 at 12:21 PM JST #

Color.

Your pictures are a good example where color provides additional detail and information that is lost in the equivalent B&W.

There are certainly instances, where pictures of people, places, signs, etc, are better rendered, expressed by B&W since it adds to the tone, condition, plight, message of the picture.

Good pictures and excellent blog filled with information about your day-to-day experience and about the geopolitics of the intersection of change in people's life and culture as a result of this fast changing and interdependent world of today.

Posted by J.F. Zarama on January 04, 2009 at 03:57 PM JST #

B&W is almost always safe. If you have really great lighting, go color, but otherwise BW. You've always had excellent judgement I think... don't question it. :)

Posted by benr on January 04, 2009 at 07:37 PM JST #

Jim,
"A tardy Holiday Greetings to family and you in Japan."
Your 'black and white v color' question alerted me as to why people like B&W media.
"Timeless while otherworldly ...'
Color can certainly inspire (attract the eye, awe or shock) but presents 'common or apparent (time framed) reality' of a subject.
I do appreciate color for instructional purposes, wish enhanced (highlighted) media was typical while attending university.
B&W media affection clearly 'dates me'. :-)
Color for 'reality based world' projects, say 'GUI v Textural' interfaces. :-)

Posted by William R. Walling on January 05, 2009 at 01:09 AM JST #

Jim:
The answer is: It Depends.

We see in color, so removing color is an editorial decision. There has to be a reason why. Painters rarely if ever painted in black and white. But the first photographs were monochrome only because of the technology at the time. So we got used to seeing monochrome images, especially in the newspapers.

That said, monochrome can be very effective, especially for portraits and indoors. My favorite classic photographers almost always shot monochrome. But their images were iconic.
(E.g. Brassai's photos of Paris at night in the '30's).

I think the images you have above are best in color. But had you focused on just one face, or a small subject, like a hand, or a part of a wall, monochrome would have added greatly to the impact.

When I see a monochrome image take today I always ask myself why did the photographer choose not to use color. There has to be a reason.

Also, I don't think the best way to get B&W is with a digital camera. Try specialized fine grain films and yellow, orange, or red filters.

Ansel Adams famous book on the Zone System is worth looking at ... in many respects taking a great monochrome picture is many times more difficult than color. Just setting your DSLR to B&W, or desaturating the image in Photoshop is not really sufficient.

I think your pictures above would be more interesting in monochrome if you cropped them down to the essentials, lowered the brightness and increased the contrast. Especially the landscape images.

Monochrome landscape images were usually taken with an orange or red filter (depending on the time of day) to increase the contrast. With some fiddling around in Photoshop you can simulate these effects.

Posted by Richard Friedman on January 05, 2009 at 03:08 PM JST #

One of my USB cameras is BW (lumenera, its basically sony in there) it's actually more fun with an IR84 filter in. It makes it very easy to see who dyed their hair.

(And no, you can't see through clothes ... that well.)

Posted by bunny evans on January 05, 2009 at 04:29 PM JST #

By the way, Wikipedia has a good article on the Zone System developed by Ansel Adams and others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_system

The basic ideas work well for digital as well as film.

Posted by Richard Friedman on January 06, 2009 at 03:05 AM JST #

There's no right answer here of course, but in general, I find photos with lots of contrast often work well in B+W, and those without work better in colour.

Posted by Calum Benson on January 06, 2009 at 03:12 AM JST #

Fascinating. :) I don`t know where to go with this, to be honest. Must take more pics and practice. I`m least interested in landscape images and most interested in people pics on the street or in really tight quarters. I have some events to go to this weekend so I`ll have to decide what to go with for the next series ...

Posted by Jim Grisanzio on January 07, 2009 at 11:47 PM JST #

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Sharon

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Posted by Sharon on January 17, 2009 at 11:31 AM JST #