The way to know if a photo should be in colour of black & white is simple. If the photo is about the colour, it should be in colour; if its not, get rid of the distraction that colour causes. This is a paraphrase of something I learned watching CreativeLive.
A couple of weeks ago my five year old son was playing in the sunbeam of the window, with the innocence that only young children have, and I captured the beautiful moment pictured above. When I took this photo I didn’t consider whether it should be in colour or black & white, however the minute I uploaded it to my computer I knew that while this photo was decent straight out of the can, it would be even better in black & white.
When this photograph is viewed in colour, you get distracted by the orange glow of his ear, the redness of his lips, and to a lesser extent the blue stitches above his right eye. However in black and white the photo is all about how the light plays on his face. To the trained eye of the photographer, the intercepting lines on his face lead your eye to his eye. To the untrained eye, the intercepting lines on his face let you know that he is playing near a window, without the need for it to be in the photograph.
Now I have made it sound like this the perfect photo, I know it is far from it. His face is almost smack dab in the centre of the frame, and it would be even better if I had framed his face lower and more to the left. It would be better if I had captured how he was holding onto the curtains, so you could see that he was playing with them. I can tell you that the reason I didn’t frame it right was because I only got a chance to fire the shutter twice before he got bored and moved on to something else. I can tell you that the reason is because I have decided to see if using only my center focus point on my camera which has the cross-hair focus make a difference to my photos. I can tell you all of these things, but they don’t really matter. What matters is that I did capture a perfect moment in time, and know that the image has more impact in black & white than in colour.
What do you think?
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