I once had a mentor I respected who was quite good at putting together presentations, papers, and essays, etc. (incidentally, he was not a photographer). But I once asked him how he came up with his content or ideas for his papers and presentations.
He told me to ask myself two questions:
1) What questions do find people asking you about... over and over.
and
2) When you look at the results of their work, what questions do you find that those same people are NOT asking... but probably should be.
I have noticed that beginner photographers will sometimes start converting their images to black and white and, for some of these images, I want to ask them what made them feel compelled to display that particular image in black & white... why not just leave it in color? I often find the beginner just doesn't know -- they're experimenting without any guidance. Not all images look best in black & white. But a few hints as to when B&W would be better would help them on their way.
For certain scenes, it is the color that "makes" the scene... remove the color and it's blah.
I think of black and white as being much better at depicting structure, rhythm, texture, and certainly contrast. I also find it's extremely good for suggesting moods of solitude, despair, but can also be used to depict peace or hope or purity (think extremes of either "low key" or "high key" photography.) If I want to shoot a portrait of someone to show the wisdom and experience of their years, then I probably want to accent the texture of their skin, their hair, their eyes... and this is more easily done in B&W where elements such as texture, structure, contrast & tonality are dominant attributes.
There are the opposite cases... for example, the compositional balance of an image might come through it's color hues rather than through it's tonality -- convert to B&W and it loses that balance (e.g. think color wheel balance). I'm normally going to think of color as a stronger way to depict a sunset -- but might make an exception if the structure and texture of the clouds and landscape play stronger than the colors.
As a segue... you typically need good contrast of light and shadow to depict texture and structural elements -- lighting angles become very important and you may need to emphasize that when deciding how to perform the black & white conversion (ironically "color" filters are used to emphasize images meant for black & white). In astrophotography, we think of images as being either "linear" or "non-linear". "Linear" simply means the tonality of a pixel as compared to other pixels is actually representative of the camera data (in other words, we didn't mess with levels and curves adjustments). "non-linear" means the differences between pixels have been manipulated and exaggerated -- areas which might really only have subtle tonality might be exaggerated to show much stronger contrast then you would have noticed in real life. The tonality of the image has been stretched (or compressed) -- so we think of that image as "non-linear."
That is to say that the manipulation of the data to show the elements in the way you intend is as much a part of the B&W image creation process as the original choice of framing and composition of the image.
Good luck!
)
Nice to be having friends on a forum such as this who actually "speak" to me; that's nicer than Googling matters, and the conversation is what these forums are about, aren't they?
