[Leica] Monochrom(e) photos

[Ted Grant]

May I offer, LADIES & gentlemen a few items re== B&W and Colour? IMAGES as printed! FILM OR DIGITAL!

This is from experience of over 65 years as a real live rookie to professional photojournalist to this day when I have decided to hang-up my Leica's!  Predominately of the M & R type film cameras! My digital M8 I have used constantly since it arrived on the market! I shall keep it near by just in case????? 
Oh  I've a fair amount of B&W and colour capturing digital moments via the M8!  I Love it! Oh please don't throw-up any of the techie crap, good, bad or ugly into all this damn electronic stuff that you have been in BORN into the digital/computer world! Please leave it alone! I don't care, as I'm reasonably alive? Well at the moment? An alive Photojournalist photographer. For how much longer? What the heck? Who cares?
But if you accept my quotation from many years gone by?
"When you photograph people in "Colour?" You photograph their clothes! But when you photograph people in B&W?  YOU PHOTOGRAPH THEIR SOULS"
That's as true as I sit here alive and typing it! Actually that's written in stone in a huge shopping mall in South Africa' with my name! :-)
Don't just think about it, look at hundreds of thousands of photographs you've seen!
The dead and dying always look worse in B&W, Soldiers, civilians, whomever? DEATH==SAD ANYWHERE?

Their is a power in B&W vision not perceived with the same power in colour! However the clothes stand out more so. In colour, faded, brilliant or not?
So be it? It's our human vision as it see's LIFE & DEATH!
Or objects that fall into the "non-life elements" of cupboards, cabinets etc! Ancient things!

Not sure this is of any help in seeing life and death, good, bad or ugly? :-(
cheers,
Dr. Ted Grant OC





-----Original Message-----
From: LUG [mailto:lug-bounces+tedgrant=shaw.ca at leica-users.org] On Behalf Of George Lottermoser
Sent: March-28-16 12:56 PM
To: Group Users Leica
Subject: Re: [Leica] Monochrom(e) photos


> On Mar 19, 2016, at 7:39 PM, Howard Ritter <hlritter at bex.net> wrote:
> 
> I’ve always been drawn to B&W photos, both to make them and to appreciate them. All photographers who aren't color blind have had the experience of wondering whether an image would look better in color or in B&W, probably for many shared reasons and for some idiosyncratic ones as well. The common experience is to look at two versions of a photo and to decide that the B&W looks better than the color, or not, but I can’t recall ever thinking that only the B&W version was pleasing and worthwhile to look at. Why should draining the color out of an unremarkable image make looking at it worthwhile? If a photograph is a representation of reality seen from one point in space, looking in one direction, at one instant in time, what is it that causes removing an aspect of reality—color—to render the image more worthwhile, or even moreso, to render the B&W version worthwhile when the color one was not? For me, in photos that are better in B&W, I think it’s the removal of color as a distraction from the dynamic or the tension of the tableau caught in the image, and the way this emphasis involves the viewer more intimately in the story. Nothing original in that analysis, of course, but just how powerful this effect can be was just brought home to me by some recent B&W photos I made.
> 
> Thinking about my affinity for B&W (considerably stimulated by Lluis’s work with the MM and by Jim Shulman’s, Chris Crawford’s, and others' film work) and how I’d gotten largely away from it with the advent of digital, I decided to trade up to an MM when Leica made me the offer for my sensor-corroded M9.
> 
> Cynthia and I, as new residents of North Carolina, this week made the obligatory pilgrimage to Biltmore, the 19th-century pile that George Vanderbilt built at Asheville with his grandfather’s fortune. No McMansion, but a bona fide one. Huge, complex, with massive stonework, endless features and surprises, and more of everything (except a darkroom and an observatory) than anyone would ever need, it would be a prime venue for Victorian-themed dinner mysteries, Halloween parties, and all manner of creepy doings, as well as a prime candidate for the kind of decrepitude that follows with being made for a vastly different era and vastly greater fortunes, as seen in British grand manor houses that haven’t been rescued by the Trust. Instead, it’s become the nidus of a vast entrepreneurial project, with scandalous admission fees, season passes (!), themed tours, gift shops, a cafe and a lunch restaurant, a winery, theme-faithful hostelries, etc. I concede that it’s worth a day’s visit.
> 
> I took the MM along and was pleased to find that a number of features of the house made for B&W photos that I found quite pleasing, many of which would be quite ordinary and not worth posting to the Gallery had they been in color. For the most part, these images are dark ones that convey a sense of vague menace or something sinister glimpsed in a reflection. The copper pots and pans are not an exception to this, although I think they’d have looked good in color.
> 
> Biltmore and personal effects. A guidebook and, inexplicably, a pair of eyeglasses left at a vista point.
> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/For+Gallery_001/Biltmore+and+personal+effects.jpg.html <http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/For+Gallery_001/Biltmore+and+personal+effects.jpg.html>
> 
> Fountain. In the wall at the base of the south slope.
> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/For+Gallery_001/Fountain.jpg.html?g2_fromNavId=x4b127eeb <http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/For+Gallery_001/Fountain.jpg.html?g2_fromNavId=x4b127eeb>
> 
> Copper Pots. The kitchen's originals, having been used to prepare dishes for every kind of person from heads of state to humble servants.
> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/For+Gallery_001/CopperPots.jpg.html <http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/For+Gallery_001/CopperPots.jpg.html>
> 
> Vanderbilt. George himself, a bibliophile, who, judging from the portraits in the house, liked to pose with his left hand over his upper right chest.
> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/For+Gallery_001/Vanderbilt.jpg.html <http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/For+Gallery_001/Vanderbilt.jpg.html>
> 
> Gun Room. Lots of shotgun hunting on the grounds back in the day.
> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/For+Gallery_001/GunRoom.jpg.html <http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/For+Gallery_001/GunRoom.jpg.html>
> 
> Hospitalitas. Stained glass at the wine shop.
> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/For+Gallery_001/Hospitalitas.jpg.html <http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/For+Gallery_001/Hospitalitas.jpg.html>
> 
> Wine Library. In the catacombs beneath the winery, a former dairy barn (??). A rivulet of an unknown fluid emerging from the dark depths…
> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/For+Gallery_001/WineLibrary.jpg.html <http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/For+Gallery_001/WineLibrary.jpg.html>

appears you and the MM are getting along well
on your first date.

Explore those files deeply and to their limits
as they are amazingly resilient 

George Lottermoser
george.imagist at icloud.com




_______________________________________________
Leica Users Group.
See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information


---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus