B&W vs. Color Portraits

B&W vs. Color portraits

In black and white, I believe one can see deeper into a persons soul. I’ve always been a fan of black and white photography. In this digital photography age we live in, black and white images often get brushed to the side unfortunately. Having grown up learning photography in a darkroom, I must say it’s a bit of a shame that black and white portraits aren’t used more often. There are so many advantages to B&W. For starters, the images have a longer shelf life. What I mean by that is how many times have you seen a color photograph of someone taken a few years ago and balked at the color shirt they were wearing or the color of their hair or how their makeup looks? B&W portraits take out many of the distractions that make an image look dated and help you to focus on the persons features that really matter. B&W has a way of cutting to the core and side stepping many distractions.

As far as company’s and websites go, having a bunch of staff pictures on a site in color can sometimes end up looking a bit shoddy in my opinion. Unless everyone in the company gets their picture taken at the same time by the same photographer doing the same color balance method, it’s a lot more difficult to attain a harmonious team-like congruency over time. Color photographs also have a shorter shelf life as far as “trends” and “looking dated” are concerned.

This particular photo shoot I did was for a company loaded of wonderful hairdressers. And as we all know, hairdressers often times change their hair color and appearances about as often as people change their socks. With that in mind, I decided to offer up my suggestion of going B&W. I also decided to use florescent tubes for my lighting as this would be a break from traditional portrait lighting methods and would give it a more “hip” kind of feel. I also like the “cateye” catch light the lighting creates in the eyes and I think it gives a very cool yet unconventional vibe to the images.