Years ago I got to have a long talk with the illustrator Kelly Freas and we found common ground in believing that black and white is a superior artistic medium to color. I’m a sucker for fine b&w drawings and my first love in photography was Ansel Adams.
I pulled out some old proof sheets, from our road trip back in 2001, and started scanning in a few negatives. These were 120 format, 2 X 2, which I like for the sharpness and lack of grain. Sometimes I still miss having a darkroom, the smell of the chemicals, and the magic of watching an image appear in the tray, little by little, growing before my eyes, details filling in. As much as I’ve been enjoying working with digital—and certainly I don’t really miss the messiness of traditional photofinishing—I wonder where kids find the “magic” of that first print.
I’ve been doing more color with digital as well and I need to shift that back to black & white. There’s a clarity, a “cleanness” to black & white that color never quite achieves.
I thought I’d share a couple of these with you today.
One thing working with these has given me, though, is an urge to do that trip again. I got some great shots and I’ve done far too little with them. I could spend the next two years doing nothing but scanning and processing the photographs in that file.
But I’d start with the black & white first.
Have a good weekend.
I’m old enough to remember when anything in color was rare; so I have a great appreciation of black an white.
BUT, it depends upon your medium, and what is available to you in that medium. I don’t do art (drawing, photography, etc.) but I DO create stitched pieces (which do not count as art, but do depend on the principles of art).
Recently I began a stitchery that is to be a recreation of a section of a b&w photograph of me at the age of 2. It isn’t going as well as I would like. DMC does not produce enough thread colors to fill out a good gray-scale translation of the black and white. The deepest blacks are from a navy-blue thread, a brown that is nearly black, and a their standard black.. These work pretty well, but in order to get the grays, the colors get VERY green! I think black and white just doesn’t truly work in stitchery.
For my next project I’m going to look into a sepia photo and see what happens there.
Sue