When I began doing news photography in the 1970s, black and white images were what we worked with. Film was developed in a darkroom — a small basement room that stank of chemicals at the first newspaper where I worked — and prints were hand processed. Color was difficult to do. Film needed to be sent for specialized processing and prints were done by specialists using very expensive equipment. And if you did get color images, newspapers at the time rarely used them.
Now color is what you get from the cheapest point-and-shoot digital camera to your smartphone to the most expensive and sophisticated digital single lens reflex or mirror-less cameras. Black and white images are rarely seen except for art photography.
It’s a shame. Beautifully done black and white photos use light and dark that set a mood that is often difficult to do with full color images. I particularly like black and white for landscapes such as this.
While the views are spectacular from the top of Mount Maxwell on Salt Spring Island, the original color digital image of this photo simply didn’t capture the mood of the place on that particular day. The sky was overcast and colors were muted, making the color version of the image appear washed out and dull. Desaturating the image (eliminating the color and going with black and white) and boosting contrast in Photoshop turned a mundane color image into something that is much more dramatic.
This shot of the mountains in the British Columbia interior was also a drab color image because of the overcast sky. Turned into a black and white image made it possible to create a much more dramatic image of the landscape and clouds.
