Some photos from Poland

Some coments are welcome

Great B&W photos.

Love the focus in #1.

I like how each picture has arms spread wide. Is this similarity intentional?

Lilly? Over to you!

Welcome! Very, very, very nice! All three are good in my book, but no1 stands above the rest for sure. Great conversions and tonal range - my sort of reportage stuff, keep them coming, thank God there is someone out there - who is like me I was beinning to wonder. What PP software do you use

one for you, to make you feel welcome, taken in that town again beginning with R!

Thanks mac for comment and especially lilly which have seen my photos before, but she probably don't remember.
Photos which I show you were taken by Pentax K10D and FA35/2.0AL ( my favourite lens).
Now something special for lilly

Oh yes, I remember now the rainy shots, good work! You sd have entered the comp RAIN with it a few weeks back.

http://karmazyniello.strawberryfields.pl

Hi. I'd like to show a little bit more. All photograps are from my Pentax K10D & FA 35/2.0 AL.

Great gallery
Thanks for sharing! Did she get your lens in #41??
Matt

Thanks for visit MattMatic.

No way

superb gallery of snaps, very inspirational, you have great talent! I want to come and visit now! Where did you take these?

I think a lot of people like good black and white photography, especially that of Cartier-Bresson, Bill Brandt, et al. The trouble is that it's so hard to do well that many people (especially me) don't even try.

G

Would it ever have been invented, if colour negative film had existed first?

I incline to suspect not, or if it had been, its place would be niche rather than mainstream as it has been. A bit like line drawings rather than paintings. There are always a few of them in the galleries, but it's the paintings that take pride of place.

All the cool stuff that you have to be able to do, to make a good monochrome picture, requires that you see in such a way as to make the best of less than there is. To be able to do this reliably, and produce art as a consequence, requires a real talent, I wouldn't for a moment dispute.

But often monochrome versions of colour pictures are good, not because there's anything inherently marvellous about black and white, but because all the distracting colour has been removed.

Almost, dare I say, as if the composition wasn't good enough before, so it had to be messed with, to remove the distractions. The messing, if you'll forgive the pejorative term (and I know some won't) was imposed by the technology when there was no alternative, and thus legitimises what we now do actively.

It's just acceptable messing, because of the history - all the early legends had nothing else to work with, so they acquired all their kudos with it, so the genre is now unassailable.

Of course, if Lilly (our resident exemplar of good monochrome photography) has only a black and white television, I will be happy to eat these words.

With, of course, salt, and black pepper.

I take colour out of my pictures alot if I want the viewer to focus on the composition and subject.

I loved #38.

Exactly. I have started taken photos 5 months ago and from the beginning B&W only. You know, it is far better and easier to me when I frameing. After 5 months my perceptivity are in black and white, it's mean I don't see any colors around me. I know exactly when I take a photo, which color give me a middle gray and which color give another tint of grey.

Not sure I agree (and am sure Lilly won't!).

Like a Chinese meal, colour photographs are quickly forgotten. Those that stick in the mind are almost invariably black and white. If you compiled a list of the ten best photographs of all time (now there's a subject for debate), I suspect that for many people, every single one would be black and white.

Colour is pretty, mono is profound.

G

I'm not sure either, although it is a view I incline more towards, the more I think about it.

But this...
.. is way too much of a generalisation.

I was very struck a little while back, reading about composition, when I happened upon an article called The art of subtraction.

There is certainly something about mono that has the potential to remove distraction (of colour in this case), to allow the photographer to draw attention to his subject, and I wouldn't dispute its value. But there are lots of ways of removing distraction, and I struggle to see mono as other than just one of those ways.

I think we've all been conditioned by a number of factors in this regard.

Firstly, there's a hundred years of mono photography to catch up with - all the historical greats had nothing else, so a large proportion of the great photos of the 20th century are mono.

Secondly, mono is different from the way we see things, so it is intrinsically more eye-catching.

Thirdly, we see bad colour photographs all the time - holiday snaps, family snaps, our own not-very-good attempts at picture taking. So we become conditioned to the fact that most colour pictures are poor. Whereas anyone these days that is making mono photographs is likely to be taking care over what they're doing.

There are probably others, but I think these reasons contribute a lot to the cachet that mono photography has.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not knocking B&W photography; I like looking at it and I can appreciate it when it's good*. And I agree that some of it is profound.

But I can't see that there's anything more intrinsically profound about it than colour, all other things being equal.

_________
*Edit: and I like karmazyniello's pictures a lot.