"Draco" <JPDFDA@HOTMAIL.COM> wrote in message >

I first became interested in B&W a couple of years ago, when I was shooting
a neighborhood park just before the onset of a major snowstorm.  The sky was
severely overcast, it was dark gray-blue and the cloud cover was very thick.
The shots showed just the first dusting of snow, but the colors of the trees
and foliage were awful.  Everything had a purplish cast, and I thought that
the images were just too poor to print.

Then the thought occurred to me to get rid of the color entirely.  The
results were amazing.  I warmed up the blacks just a bit, rather than keep
everything in pure grayscale.  Not sepia by any means, but just a very "dark
brown" as opposed to pure black.  I saw that park in an entirely different
way.

When I was much younger, I had the impression that B&W was "old fashioned,"
just like B&W movies, and that color was the more modern, and better, way to
make images.  I had not shot a roll of B&W in well over 35 years.  Having
rediscovered B&W, through my digital camera, of all things, I keep on
experimenting with it.  Perhaps that is why I appreciate Daniel's B&W
images.  They have less distraction.  The brain is forced to contemplate the
subject, rather than look at the background scenery.  Perhaps it's the
minimalist in me, but I think that such images are more "pure."  I read a
quote awhile back to the effect that "color was obscene."  I am beginning to
see that there is a grain of truth in that statement.

I had previously been fascinated by well-saturated colors in my photographs,
and the advent of the digital darkroom served to further my ability to
produce prints where the colors seemed as they were about to jump right off
the paper.  Now I am reorienting myself toward less-saturated, muted colors.
I hadn't realized just how much the saturation level of color could change
an otherwise identical image.

I've been looking at color in everyday objects and I am coming to the
conclusion that the color that we produce in our prints is not
representative of the way color actually appears to the eye in real life.
My prints had been oversaturated.

There are times when color can become so much of a distraction that it
defeats the purpose of the image.  I need to get some books on the classic
B&W photographers and study their styles.  Sometimes less is actually more.

True, true...

I was just thinking, the paintings hanging on the walls
aren't in brilliant colors, they are subdued and subtle.
Think back to the last time you walked through an art
museum.

The obsession with saturation is, why?