Color Photography

I first became interested in photography as a boy of eleven or twelve, looking through magazines such as Life and Sports Illustrated. Life was for human interest stories and the photojournalism of that era in the sixties was almost completely in black and white.

Sports Illustrated, however, had many stories shot in color and I remember being dazzled by the “decisive moments ” captured by the pros of professional athletes performing at the highest level. Part of the thrill was seeing these famous athletes decked out in their team colors that no black and white shot could match. The color just added another dimension to the story.

When I started shooting intensively in my early thirties, the serious guys were using color slide film. For many years Kodachrome was the gold standard and once Fuji came out with Velvia, many landscape photographers quickly shifted to using it.

It was exciting to get your slides back from the lab, mount them in a carousel and share them with your friends via a projected slide show.

Now, of course, shooting color is so much easier, cheaper and more convenient.There are many excellent software programs to play with and tweak your images and recent camera innovations have made resolution, sharpness and rich color a given. The best digital SLRs now match the quality of medium format cameras in almost every respect.

Spending so much time shooting in the Southwestern US and more particularly the Colorado Plateau, I’ve come to realize that as much as I love black and white, some scenes just demand to be shot in color.

Helpless to resist, I oblige.