Originally posted by Arjay Bee There is some notion that there is a way of seeing that develops by being forced to use a particular tool. Visit the Online Photographer linked above and the attached comments or even just try using one lens for a month or longer and see what the format does to your thinking before taking a shot.
Ok read the entire thing twice - carefully.
For simplicity's sake one of the comments came close to my own thoughts so I quote:
"My sense is that our mysterious inner eye has its own tastes for combinations of tonality, texture, composition, color, light, and shadow. Some compositions don't "feel right" in color or in wide angle. Some don't feel right in tight black and white. I'm getting to the point where I switch back and forth between color and monochrome as much as I hit my +/- exposure comp button (my Sony RX100 II will shoot a RAW and mono jpeg at the same time, so I'm a happy camper)."
My own rough sense of "thinking BW" is where color may be just a distraction or an out right negative to the final imagine and/or where the subject matter more or less stands on form alone and all you want to say about it can be expressed in the language of tonality. Also BW can have a level of abstractness for art photogaphy that you can never achieve in color.
Can't think of a better pure BW photographer in the above sense than Edward Weston:
Last edited by wildman; 09-16-2013 at 04:08 AM.