Making images in color intentionally

- In my own work I mostly shoot black and white. And very often when I'm critiquing images or working with students, they'll actually start making fun of me because so often I'll say, "Well, the fix for this image is you need to convert it to black and white." And I think I'm probably, usually right. But anyway, I always have a reason even if I'm wrong. And that reason is that a lot of times color is extra information in an image. It complicates our goal as photographers so often as to just try to simplify the scene, there's too much in it.

And sometimes one of the easiest ways to simplify a scene is to strip the color out of it, especially if the scene is composed around strong light and shadow or very strong lines where the point of the photo is graphics and you don't need color to see that. We're in a very carefully composed frame right now. If you'd like to know how it was composed, you can see a detailed take down of it in my Advanced Composition course. But this is also a color scene, and this is a scene that needs to be color.

I can actually look at this ... I've got a little monitor here. I'm looking at it right now, and this is actually a scene that I don't think would work in black and white. Here's what it looks like in black and white. It's still a nicely composed scene in terms of lines. We've still got this leaning ... Oh, this is hard to do. That diagonal line back there, that's pointing down to my head. And this vertical line right here. I'm still in this nice shape. We've got these repeating three columns moving across here. This is all very nice but the color really adds a lot to it, for a couple of reasons.

Here in black and white, the tonality of this wall and my face and this shade of green they're all pretty similar. And so, I'm losing some depth in the image. It's hard to see separation of these different elements. It is possible to tone those differently. So, there is maybe a good black and white to be had from this. But if we go back to color, it's that whole Wizard of Oz effect. If we go back to color and I look at the scene, the color is not distracting. It's not extra information.

There are things that are happening here because of hue that I don't get in a black and white scene. First one is my shirt and these walls are pretty much the same color. And so compositionally they're being attached to each other. And that's nice. That helps the eye move through the frame and lead directly to me, which is where I want your eye. It's where the director wanted your eye. I should put it that way. It's also nice that this is here, that this color is here to create a separation between my shirt and the wall.

If I was ... I'm going to make Jacob, our director, mad and move out of my light a little bit. If I was to intersect with the wall more ... This may be a bad example cause now I've got ... Or actually it's a good example. My face is the same color as this, and so here's a case where that intersection is not a good thing. But if I was up here, now I've got a problem that my shirt's blending into the wall. Just imagine what it would be like if this wasn't here and I was leaning against that same color. So, the color of this is very important to create separation as well as to reinforce this rhythm that's going on from that pillar to this pillar to this pillar.

And it's further reinforced by that thing behind me. So, I don't feel like the color in this image is an extra level of information that needs to be processed. That's often what color is in an image, and that's why I often, not often, that's why when I feel and image needs to be converted to black and white, that's the reason is that the color is another layer of information that your eye has to deal with that is distracting from the composition. Here the color is supporting the composition and making it work. So, for those of you who feel like, boy, I don't know when I should convert to black and white and when I shouldn't.

Well, the great thing with digital is you can do it for free and you don't lose your color image. You should just try it and slowly you'll learn. But if you look at color images in the terms that we've been talking about here of how does the color support the composition. And if you look in black and white images in terms of what is making the composition work and is color necessary, that is the kind of line of thinking that you take when you're trying to figure out if an image should work in black and white or color. This image works in color.