When I was studying in high school, I was very fond of playing with images. One time I found the grayscale picture mode, I was very interested. I found out that black and white images are very useful in many purposes in art and photography.
Looking at a full colored picture and a black and white picture, viewers can find many new things in any way of thinking. Some black and white pictures are like an open-ended story. A story contains not only just what the picture shows but also the things outside of the picture. For example, here is a picture of my friend, Khang, in the trip to Da Lat, January 2007. I took this picture when he was standing next to Xuan Huong lake, looked like he was full of thinking and emotion (actually he was just looking at the lake). However, the original picture, the colored one, cannot show the emotion well. Therefore I changed it to a grayscale picture with Photoshop CS2 (Image->Mode->Grayscale). Now, in my opinion, the picture has some emotion within (a man standing in the shadow of the tree, looking at the vast space of the lake, viewer cannot see the face of the man and his body is covered in dark light. This, I think has added some more emotion to the image, better than the original one).
Another purpose to use black and white images that I found out is they can trick the eyes and make viewers think the picture was taken long ago. For example, the below pictures were also taken in the trip to Da Lat in January 2007 by my friend, Thao. If there were not the original one, who say the picture was taken recently ? (at least they can guess the time is after 1975, because there is an antenna in the picture :D). Black and white color did change the picture magically. We can feel the value of time and the breath of history in it.
Moreover, after try some experiments, I found out black and white add values to the picture or in another word, make the picture more valuable. Below is a picture of a Vietnamese girl in Vietnamese traditional dress (*) (Ao dai). The colored picture (I took it from extremecharity.typepad.com website), in my opinion, shows nothing but just a beautiful image of a young woman wearing Ao dai. However, after change it to black and white, the picture changed significantly. It now has the classical and elegant view, showing value of the past, of tradition and the beautifulness of Vietnamese women and clothes.
If anyone want to create a thoughtful, high valuable, elegant, classical and impressive picture, black and white picture is a powerful tool. When images is change to black and white, they are not photography anymore, it is now art.
Those are just my first feeling and touching with black and white images. I will do more research on this aspect as it is now my inspiration.
*Image source: 321 Cyclo: September 2005, http://extremecharity.typepad.com/321cyclo/2005/09/, viewed March 5, 2007
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