Black & White Photography :: Embracing our love for it

Oh… the black and white photo. Classic and timeless imagery. How we love a good black and white. Let us tell you why.

 

To us, when photos are black and white they become more powerful. When we look at a black and white photo, it feels like that moment is still happening. Like time is still passing, slowly and forever, inside that photo. Black and white photography seems to quiet the moment. It focuses us, forcing us to look beyond the color, and see what’s really happening. We find ourselves looking at the eyes of the subject, or their expressions, or a gesture more often. We see them better, we look deeper, we feel more. There’s a greater ability as the viewer, to skip over everything else that’s there, but not as important as what’s happening. Black and white photos offer no distractions. For this, and many other reasons, we admit that we love black and white photography.

We don’t remember exactly how it happened, how we came to think we couldn’t infuse our love for black and white photography into our business. A few years ago however, we somehow became convinced it was unwise as wedding photographers to edit too many black and white photos. Somewhere we read an article warning Brides to be weary of photographers who edit “too many photos in black and white”. You see, in some theories of thought, a less than stellar image can be salvaged by editing it in black and white. That a photograph edited in black and white, had to be as a crutch. Though we don’t buy into that camp (a bad image is a bad image no matter how you mess with it in post production) we became worried that if we didn’t showcase the majority of our photos in color, we might be seen as “lazy” or like we were trying hide mediocre work. Without much more thought, we jumped on board the color train and made sure to only edit a small number of photos black and white in post production. We followed the advice of one or two articles, and mindlessly tried to mimic our favorite big name photographers. If they did lots of color, we would too. If they talked about how much they loved color, we would too.

After having a few come to Jesus moments during a mentoring session with the top industry leaders (like… the guys who teach the photographers we had been following) we realized how ridiculous we were with the black and white thing. Very quickly, we got over it, and we’re excited to get back to our love for black and white photos. Because now we understand our work should not appeal to the masses. Everyone will not love our photos. We will not be everyone’s cup of tea. Our photography should speak to the hearts of kindred souls to ours, who appreciate timeless imagery, and love black and white photos as much as we do. We want to find the couples out there who treasure the real, honest, emotional moments of their wedding day more than a feature on a big name blog.

 

Color photography is amazing. It’s vibrant, beautiful, storytelling, full of detail, and completely necessary, especially in wedding photography. We absolutely love color photos, and appreciate them just as much as we do black and white. We’re just here today to say out loud that we love a good black and white photo, and we’ll be doing a lot more of it. So when we’re editing photos from a wedding, when our gut says “oh… this one deserves to be black and white” we’ll do it. We won’t suppress our creative hearts just because some wedding blog got it wrong a few years ago. So, as we move into the new year, don’t be shocked if you see a slightly heavier hand in our black and white edits.