Is Color Better?

You may be starting to notice a trend here, and it's not a coincidence. I do tend to have a preference for black & white photography.

I read a posting on a photo forum the other day. Someone posted a message that essentially said "Why would anyone want to take black and white photos anymore? Every camera sold now has the ability to record true colors. Black and white is a waste of time."

Now it’s not clear if this person was just trying to stir up a flame war, or if they did indeed feel that way. But it did bring up an interesting point...why do many photographers still work in black and white?

For me, there is just something about a black and white photo that makes me stop and look at it more closely. With color, the photos look pretty much like real life, and that is what we are all used to seeing. But the absence of color perhaps causes our brains to shift gears a bit and look for secondary cues about what it's really seeing - light patterns, shapes, intricate detail. All those things seem to come to life in black and white.

Or maybe it's the nostalgia of it all...black and white automatically suggests by-gone era when life was less complicated...or at least many of us living now seem to romanticize that it was...