Monuments II
These last two shots really had to be in monochrome. I did think about reducing the saturation levels so the barest colour appeared, but in the end I went for classic black and white. I wonder sometimes if some people today struggle with understanding what black and white photography is about. We live in a world of instant simulation, and it takes imagination and effort to "read" a black and white.
Ansel Adams once likened working in colour to be like playing an out of tune piano (Adams was a concert pianist before turning to photography).
'"I can get—for me—a far greater sense of ‘color' through a well-planned and executed black-and-white image than I have ever achieved with color photography," he wrote in 1967. For Adams, who could translate sunlight's blinding spectrum into binary code perhaps more acutely than anyone before or since, there was an "infinite scale of values" in monochrome. Color was mere reality, the lumpy world given for everyone to look at, before artists began the difficult and honorable job of trying to perfect it in shades of gray.' www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/ansel-adams-in-color-...
I like that description. Mind you I recently purchased "Ansel Adams in Color" (Little, Brown and Company, 1993), and although there's not a lot of his colour slides left (most have deteriorated with time), what is in this collection is a real treasure.
Monuments II
These last two shots really had to be in monochrome. I did think about reducing the saturation levels so the barest colour appeared, but in the end I went for classic black and white. I wonder sometimes if some people today struggle with understanding what black and white photography is about. We live in a world of instant simulation, and it takes imagination and effort to "read" a black and white.
Ansel Adams once likened working in colour to be like playing an out of tune piano (Adams was a concert pianist before turning to photography).
'"I can get—for me—a far greater sense of ‘color' through a well-planned and executed black-and-white image than I have ever achieved with color photography," he wrote in 1967. For Adams, who could translate sunlight's blinding spectrum into binary code perhaps more acutely than anyone before or since, there was an "infinite scale of values" in monochrome. Color was mere reality, the lumpy world given for everyone to look at, before artists began the difficult and honorable job of trying to perfect it in shades of gray.' www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/ansel-adams-in-color-...
I like that description. Mind you I recently purchased "Ansel Adams in Color" (Little, Brown and Company, 1993), and although there's not a lot of his colour slides left (most have deteriorated with time), what is in this collection is a real treasure.