EMOTIONS

I was reading an interview with Mitchell Kanashkevich the other day about the importance of color in photography and how it's needed in order to pull emotion for the viewer. This in turn led to quite a few black and white photographers decrying the statement. While I find Mitchell's work stunning, I have to say that I agree with the black and white photographers.

Emotional pull can be further rendered with black and white. I've been playing around with black and white photography lately. I always shoot in color, but when viewing the image, I look at it to determine what I want the viewer to see. I experiment with dark images, gritty images. I don't think everything is about happy, vivid colorful shots. I've also been playing around with industrial imagery, which to me, while it holds a certain value in color, expresses a lot more emotion in black and white. Maybe it has to do with the fact that color film wasn't available at the beginning of the industrial revolution and by processing the image in black and white, it holds true to form. The industrial age, while it made many rich and brought the world to a new stage of being, at least in my eyes, was not a pretty picture. Personally, it's effect is black and white. Gritty. Dirty. And in today's green environment, showing the beginning as it was, gritty and dirty, makes for a true life emotional image.

So, with that said, tell me, which photo elicits more emotion - color or black and white?

UNTITLED 1

Seriously? I honestly don't know what to call this. The photography? Piece of cake. Titling? Well, sometimes it just boggles my mind.

But the trip, the trip to get this photo was unbelievable. It started on the Canal Walk in Richmond, VA, by Tredegar Iron Works (now the Civil War Museum) and ended on Belle Isle.

Tredegar Iron Works has all this beautiful, black, industrial ironwork that makes for wonderful shots. I've been working with black and white lately and there's nothing like industry to make a great black an white. I only touched the surface.

Belle Isle was once a prison for Union Soldiers (a pretty nasty prison from the historic markers around the place) and served many other functions before it became a city park. It's a great point of exploration. I only walked a small part of the island and will definitely return.

The whole place is surround by the James River which in and of itself is a beautiful body of water. Over the next few weeks, I'll share some of what I found.