Photography is what we use to capture the moment. But, once the moment has been lived, the scene has been viewed, and the moment is gone forever. Thanks to photography, you can freeze that moment and make it immortal.
Photography is about the soul and the vision. Through photography, you can look into people’s souls and your soul as an artist. As a result, you can better understand your feeling, your values, and what is essential for you.
Whether street photography, portraiture, or landscape photography, photography relies on your intuition: how you see the world and perceive reality. Thanks to photography, you see everything differently, and all you have is your emotions and feelings about the scene in front of your viewfinder.
You can only take the photo when you feel it and think it is the right moment to do it.
All the technique in the world doesn’t compensate for the inability to notice.
Eliott Erwitt
That said, the big question is: do you see the world and want to represent it in colors or black and white?
Do you want to represent your reality in colors or black and white?
I love storytelling, travel, and meeting new people as a photographer. I love this medium, but I can’t decide between color and black and white. For different reasons, I love and use both depending on the subject, my feelings, and the photograph’s mood.
Don’t shoot what it looks like. Show what it feels like.
David Alan Harvey
There are days and situations in which I believe that reality thrives in black and white photography. It even looks more realistic to me as it can remove any distractions of the colors and focus on shapes, light, shadows, and texture. However, sometimes, it feels like we use colors to impress the viewers, and I prefer the raw beauty of black and white photography. When I take photos of a subject in black and white, to me, it looks like giving a representation of more truth, portraying the essence of reality.
We live in a world where most photographers shoot in color, and color photographs are more popular on social media, even if there are few photographers the use only black and white. So I think the debate shouldn’t be about which one is better, but about how to use color and black and white for our artistic purposes.
Compositions, angles, lines, textures, light, and shadows give the quality of a photograph, and it doesn’t matter if you take a photo in coloror black and white. Color and black and white don’t make a picture better or worse; they allow your storytelling to act differently.
Colors and black and white are just both amazing. Just different.
I think choosing between colors and black and white is essential, depending on what your storytelling is going to be. It is about the way you want to represent reality. In other words, it is another artistic way to treat your subject to tell its story through photographs in colors or black and white.
If your photo is fantastic, it will stand out regardless you captured it in color or black and white.
According to Eliott Erwitt, we can say that “Color is descriptive. Black and white is interpretive“.