Recently I was listening to a very popular photographer talk about black and white photography. Now, I very much admire this person and am not looking to increase my Internet viewership by attacking someone with a massive on line presence by them acknowledging my dispute of their comment. In fact, their comment does have some merit. That being said, I am not going to disclose their name.
The comment that was thrown out there, and I believe it was half in jest, was (I am paraphrasing) digital photographers only convert bad pictures to black and white. They explained that people take a photo and have a color issue with it, so they convert it to black and white. I believe the example given was if the photo had a bad white balance issue a photographer would convert that to black and white to cover the problem. I am sure this is true in some cases, but I like to look at it in a different way. I have a few black and whites in my portfolio but I mostly shoot color. I will completely admit I did not make any of these photos with the intent of converting them to black and white. When I released the shutter, I 100% believed the final image would be full color. Were any of them bad pictures, no, if they were I would not have kept them. I have said this a million times, I only show my best work and these images have ended up being in my photography shows. What made me convert them to Black and white was one simple thing, the color was distracting to the subject. As a photographer I want to control as much of my audiences perception as possible, so if I don’t want you to think about the colors in that image then I am going to remove the colors. This is a fundamental rule in photography, reduce and simplify. If an element of your image does not direct the viewer to your desired intent, then remove it.
So back to the original comment. Lets say that picture with the white balance problems is something like this. You shot the photo with a speed lite on a models face, but in that photo much of the environment has harsh tungsten lighting except for the model. you have two strong competing white balances, this is fixable with some photshop magic but you feel altering it would take away for the images authenticity. Just because you didn’t gel your speed light does not mean this is a bad photo. What it means is the competing color temperatures are distracting to the viewer. You convert the image to black and white and Bam! You have simplified the image and the viewer knows exactly what the image is about. I am sure you have all heard this many times, sometimes being a great photographer isn’t about know what to show, its about knowing what not to show.