Bruce Walker wrote:
I'm still figuring out my reasons for going with b&w, but they generally incorporate some of your points, especially the subject isolation, with some of Paul's -- mood, etc. I find that a lot of spontaneous location shots will have a disharmonious colour palette, so b&w removes that factor entirely and improves the image no end. The more I study folks like Peter Lindbergh the more I admire good b&w, and try to emulate that style. A really handy feature of b&w is free skin processing. Portraits of most folks look quite a bit better in b&w than colour, especially if they have any skin redness or blotchiness. And for even more free retouching, simply adding the digital equivalent of a red filter helps enormously.
You reminded me of other advantages of B&W. A lot of time stage lighting is really ugly colors, and sometimes the lighting on someplace will be a bizarre mixture of yellow from the lights, blue from the window and green reflected from the dojo mats (for example), and black and white can just make all of those problems go away.
Noise is another big thing. To me, a noisy photo in black and white just looks "vintage". I'm used to black and white low light photos looking grainy, so noisy black and white isn't as jarring as noisy color. This was especially true on my K20 which would have tremendous amounts of noise in the blue channel.
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