Black & White Photography

I cut my photographic teeth in the days of Tri X and Kodachrome. The greatest photographers of the twentieth century had always shot in black and white. Steichen, Weston, Adams, Avedon, Cartier Bresson; the list goes on and on. All of their masterpieces were in black and white. Color was for family snapshots and vacations and black and white was for the pros and artists.

One great attraction for shooting in this genre was the possibility to make your own prints in the darkroom. Printing was relatively easy and getting lost in the excitement and creativity of the process a regular occurrence. It was really a joy to enter into my red lit, chemical smelling man cave.

With the advent of digital photography and the ongoing exponential progress in its technology, I now happily shoot in that format and easily convert the color files I’ve created into black and white. The resolution, sharpness and tonal range of these images keep improving as the cameras evolve.

The final images of much of my landscape photography of Arizona and the southwest is in black and white. Having been the only show in town at the birth of photography, it continued to be so for almost 100 years. Now, it is one genre among many, but to my eye, it remains photography’s beauty queen; classy, mature and sexy.