I have a keen interest in black and white photography, but not skills to speak of. It may be that some essential aptitude is missing, that I don't have an eye for seeing the world - or at least photography subject matter - in terms of black and white images. But colors, that is another matter, I'm usually spotting colors first and only then see the shapes and relations of objects.
Today I once again returned (for a short while) to the Laajalahti bay, where I every so often take photographs. Today was a gray day, and the cloud cover was thick, so the colors were flat and lifeless.
But here are three images in any case, all a bit different from the any previous ones I have taken at Laajalahti. It seems that I'm seeing things a bit differently nowadays. I'm not sure it is a development for the better, but at least there is some change happening.
For the black-and-white image I did the conversion in LightZone, originally I was not planning this, but in post-processing it seemed that black-and-white is the way to go.
Update: Paul Maxim posted a nice tight piece on an important topic, "reality", an how you are not able to claim to represent reality with a photograph. However, I very much dislike the idea that truth (or reality) is relative and that any two claims could be of equal value.
Although philosophically there is no single commonly accepted definition of reality (or truth), I very much believe that some claims have a stronger grasp on reality than others. And conversely, that there are claims whose touch on reality is nonexistent or at least close to nonexistent.
So, returning to photography, I don’t think that any image or a series or images can represent reality (or truth), but I think some photographs convey a little bit of evidence towards an approximation of truth. And collectively these photographs can help us to get a grip on “reality” (however you want to define it) and help us to understand some little part of our own existence.
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4 comments:
I especially like the B&W inage; very well presented! I always enjoy your images of trees; I suppose it comes naturally as I once earned a living in the woods as a forester.
In my teens I also did some work as a forester, in our own forest (which was quite little, but still). We didn't use a tractor or harvester for moving the timber from the forest; instead, we had a horse which pulled the sleigh. A lot of manual work!
Colors or not? For sure it depends! The b&w shot here is great without colors (so are the b&w in your newer posts, kudos), the color shot probably would work not so well when the red is removed,,,
My gut feeling is that b&w transports a different set of ideas, maybe because its connected in a different way with our perceptive system. Think only of the human's eye color perception, getting lost when the light level is low enough, aka. night. And night is connected with a different set of ideas, feelings, state of mind. Given that b&w photographs in a certain way connect with this 'other' mindset, for sure it sings a different tune within us.
And we do need both, day and night, color and b&w
@Markus: The comparison to night seeing is very illustrative. I wonder, have the skills of seeing changed since inventing the artificial light (and color tv and film) - there isn't so often situations when we absolutely must rely on the night vision.
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