Exercise
Find a street that particularly interests you – it may be local or further afield. Shoot 30 colour images and 30 black and white images in a street photography style.
In your learning log, comment on the differences between the two formats.
What difference does colour make? Which set do you prefer and why?
I found this a very interesting exercise. I like black and white photos, but usually just convert them from colour. So actually taking them in black and white gave it a new perspective.
In order to take photos in black and white I had to learn how to set my camera to Monochrome in the shooting menu and then because I use a DSLR, I had to use the live view on the screen rather than the viewfinder, which obviously doesn’t change.
I chose this village street, because it had a number of different elements that I thought might be interesting. Ultimately though, the time of day and the lighting didn’t add much value to the images.
I decided to take the colour photos first and then take black and white ones, as I didn’t want to mix them up. This turned out to be a good plan because as I had taken them in RAW, Lightroom subsequently converted them all back to colour when I downloaded them.
For the purposes of this exercise, jpgs would have probably been sufficient.
As it was a very ‘bland’ day, lighting and weather wise , the colour images are only enhanced where there are blocks of green or dashes of colour to lift them, but they do give a feel of the time of year and almost deserted streets.
The black and white images however, don’t offer the same information about time of year. They could have been taken at any time. I also found that they are much more structured and detailed. There are not some many images of the trees and flowers and more of buildings and items where there is a greater contrast between the elements of the image.
I’m not sure I really have a favourite set of these images. They both do different things. I think on balance I prefer the colour ones here. Only because you get a better sense of time of year.