If you're anything like me, You'll see and watch that red ball that crosses your path and immediately forget what you were doing or saying. I do that same thing with color photographs. Every time i go through my own images whether I'm shooting digital or film, if a color is distracting my eyes from my original subject i'll go to black and white. Black and white photography is the epitome of classic photography for me personally. It was the only type of photography available when the medium was first invented so naturally it portrays and nostalgic feel to it. Thats not why I'm here though. I'm not going to go through the whole argument of why black and white is better or color is better. I wanted to go through one of the main reasons i go choose color or go black and white.
You'll probably hear people talk about how black and what is more "artistic or fine art", but maybe thats not how we should go about choosing color or black and white. You can take a look at a lot of photographers that created lots of photos that fit into the genre using color photographs. I on the other hand take a different approach to choosing black and white. I started thinking more and more about color photographs and why i would choose a color photo over a black and white and vice versa. Now there are some days where i go out with intentions to shoot a certain way. I try to challenge myself on a daily basis as far as limiting myself, but thats a whole other blog post in itself.
If you take a look at the two photographs above, you can already kind of see what i'm talking about. In the example above I would prefer to stick with the color photo. This is a photo from a parade in Tonasket WA. The Tonasket high school colors are blue and i noticed a few other people wearing the blue colors i decided to take the photo. When you take a look at the black and white photo, the idea of the blue is completely lost and does nothing for the photo itself.
In this example you can see how colors are actually distracting and draw your attention away from the subject in the photo. Next time you're out making photographs. Try to remember how important colors are in your photographs rather than make it color just because. Colors can convey emotions and become quite significant. On the other hand colors can also distract and make no sense in a photo. Quick tip, Your eyes tend to be drawn to either the brightest point or color in a photo. Keep that in mind when your Making and editing your photographs.