Colour vs Black & White — Benson Spiers Photography

Black and white.

Colour.

The choice seems obvious, black and white is clearly superior. Or is it?

When starting out, one of the first creative touches we can apply is switching a photograph into black and white, and the resulting transformation can be quite striking. Our photos are suddenly dramatic, moody, and oozing with classic cool. This path is often too tempting to resist and we continue down the black and white avenue, enjoying the added atmosphere our photos now possess, blissfully unaware of the mistakes we may be making and worse yet, the scenes we may be missing!

Overcast & rainy days are well-suited to black and white

Historically though, this was not a choice available to photographers until James Maxwell’s discovery in 1861 that all colours could be created by mixing the right amounts of red, green and blue light. This triggered a chain of inventions which eventually resulted in the systems we know and use today. The first reliable colour photography process (which still required subjects be still for up to 30 seconds!), was discovered in 1907 when the Lumière brothers developed and manufactured their Autochrome plates. In fact, prior to that, photographers had resorted to painting colours on to their images!

Unfortunately, despite the natural allure of black and white photographs, not all scenes are suited to the monochrome palette. Inevitably, any photo where you have attempted to match the colour of your subject to that of a passing vehicle or building does not lend itself to a black and white edit, nor does a photo where a subject’s colourful outfit has caught your eye. Furthermore, one of the most frequent mistakes is taking an underwhelming colour image and switching it to black and white to improve it; sadly an underwhelming image is often underwhelming no matter the editing process we apply.

This image would not have the same effect in black and white!

However, scenes which can benefit from this switch to black and white include both rainy and overcast days, and those with bright sunshine. The latter provides the opportunity for strong shadows and high contrast images while the former are often particularly poignant for portraits and rainy day expressions. Indeed, the addition of texture to an image, via raindrops on a window, wrinkles on a face, or simply a miserable day, is often best conveyed in black and white. This could be explained by the increased emotional pull, and the resulting journey our imagination takes us on without any colourful distractions. There is also arguably a greater scope to deliberately make exposure “mistakes” with a black and white image, either by making it too dark to only reveal the highlights and silhouettes, or by overexposing it to reveal the simplest compositional geometry.

As ever, street photographers have successfully documented everyday life in both styles. Alex Webb and Martin Parr are two of the better known advocates of colour street photography, filling their images with vivid scenes and overly saturated colours; while Elliot Erwitt and Vivian Mayer are but two of the many well-known disciples of black and white imagery, with their focus on capturing humorous everyday moments.

Fortunately, despite the seemingly large gauntlet of mistakes awaiting us, it is possible to take both monochrome and colour images without committing high treason in the eyes of the photography gods, but it is useful to know what to avoid!

“Colour is descriptive, black and white is interpretive” Eliot Erwitt