[Leica] Woman and Dog

[henningw at archiphoto.com (Henning Wulff)]

At 4:30 PM +0100 9/24/09, Neil Beddoe wrote:
>Somebody asked me once whether anyone would print black and white if 
>colour photography had been invented first.  I don't know but I 
>think it would be a lot less common.
>


Exactly. B&W in general (and this is a generalization) relates to 
nostalgia and what we liked in older photographs and the fact that 
until quite recently B&W photography was much cheaper, much easier 
and more archival.

Just think of the photos we would prefer if photography when first 
invented would have been able to produce excellent chroma  but uneven 
or even lacking luminance information. I realize this is somewhat far 
fetched, but our preference, especially among older practitioners to 
prefer our initial step further into abstraction (all photography 
already being an abstraction) to remove colour information from phots 
is almost certainly due to the historical technical development.

Looking at painting/drawing, we see that B&W has been a parallel 
development often due to certain materials, but abstractions have 
taken all sorts of forms; again, due to technology/technique certain 
types of abstractions have received more attention than others but in 
general B&W has not been a major path like it has in photography.


All that, and I realize my traditional, home darkroom printing side 
can relate to the B&W picture better, but the colour pallette in 
particular is such that in the end I think the colour picture is the 
better one.

-- 

    *            Henning J. Wulff
   /|\      Wulff Photography & Design
  /###\   mailto:henningw at archiphoto.com
  |[ ]|     http://www.archiphoto.com