Matt J. Olsen

Some photos just look better in b&w, but the proper mood and contrast has to be there first.

The photo below is only in b&w because someone suggested it and I wanted to entertain the idea.  The reason this person gave?  ”The fog looks cool and moody.”

But we have to look at the photo as a whole.  Here, color looks best in my opinion, because the sky is bright with good color contrast, the sun is making the yellow-green grass glow, and well, it’s a happy and inspiring scene.  It’s full of life and makes me wonder if I maybe just missed an elk walking through that field.  

Taking the color away takes away 90% of the emotion and meaning.  Yes, the fog is moody, but that’s not the entire shot.  Also, the sense of depth I feel from the background mountain ranges goes away when the color is gone.  Basically, the photo becomes boring.

Let’s look at another example.

Here, b&w makes a little more sense with the right crop. In the color version, I framed the photo to include lots of color variation and contrast to show off a beautiful scene from high in the mountains.  From right in front of my feet all the way up to highest parts of the sky, I wanted it all to be seen and taken in at once in the photo.  

However, when cropped to exclude the foreground rocks and the upper portion of the sky, I ended up with a photo that focused on the slow advance of the fog into the valley, surrounded by desolate mountains beneath a dark sky.  From 14,000 feet, it was somewhat humbling and revering to see the land slowly become swallowed by the clouds.

Here, a b&w conversion makes perfect sense because I’m trying to illustrate that mood (which is what I always try to do in my photography) and isolate 3 particular objects: the mountains/foreground, the fog, and the sky.  In my conversion, I increased the contrast and lowered the green levels a bit.  This resulted in dark (but still detailed) mountains, a bright and powerful fog, all beneath a medium gray sky.

In this instance, b&w enhanced the feeling of the photo instead of taking away from it.

Another b&w example from Colorado:

This shot was almost completely b&w all by itself without any processing.  All I did for this photo was just suck out the orange hues from the midtones.  The mood and tension I felt while driving through this scene on the edge of a mountain could only be represented through the simplicity and graduated grays of b&w.