More Black and White Vs. Color

Scarboro Baptist Church in Jenkins County, Georgia in living color.

                        And here it is in a black and white conversion from the color file.

When the editor at Countryman Press asked me to do a second edition of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia, they also asked me to create an additional tour, making a total of 16 in the book. I chose to make this a tour of backroads and small towns roughly along and just north of Interstate 16 in southeast Georgia.

After doing all the travel and photography for the tour, at considerable expense, the powers that be decided it would be too expensive to enlarge the book that much, so I was left with a bunch of unused photos and research material. I should write it up and submit it as an article to Georgia Backroads Magazine and recover at least some of my cost.

Anyway, as I was mapping out the tour I found this beautiful little church in Jenkins County (no relation!) and thought it would make a good example for this post on color versus black and white. Which do you like?

Just to give you something more to look out, here is a color photo of the Gordon-Lee mansion in Chickamauga, Georgia, and a black and white photo converted from the color file.

 

The photo of the Scarboro Baptist Church was made with a Fuji X-H1 camera and the Gordon Lee mansion with a Fuji X-T20, both digital. The lens for both was the Fujinon 16-50mm f3.5-5.6. Just a "kit" lens, but plenty sharp.

For myself, I prefer the color version of both photographs, although I think the Scarboro church photo is almost too picture-perfect. Your mileage may vary.

Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins. "White Dress" copyright Judy and Tony King Foundation, 2022.)  

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

My book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, is now out of print, although copies are apparently still available from Amazon, and possibly other sources. The second edition is now in the editing stage and is scheduled to be published on December 6th.

Black and White or Color?

"White Dress," by B.A."Tony" King

 

To me, this photograph of a ittle girl's white party dress by B.A. King, whom I consider to have been Ameerica's greatest unknown photographer, could not possibly be improved by being in color. (I wrote several posts about King some time ago. To check them out, click here.

On the other hand, my photograph of sunrise in McLemore Cove would be nothing without color, even though it's mostly only variations of a single color..

"Sunrise in the Cove."  McLemore Cove, Northwest Georgia

The issue of whether to photograph in color or black and white was a non-issue for nearly the first hundred years of photography's history because there was no practical way to photograph in color. That ended in the mid-1930s when Kodachrome was invented, but color film and processing were expensive; so for many years most photographs were made in black and white. The studio portraits we had made of our infant son Donny in the late 1960s, for instance, were made on black and white film and hand colored.

So much of the great work of the 20th century was in black and white, and would not have been better if it had been in color. But as digital photography began to surpass film in the early years of this century, the question of color or black and white became a non-issue again, because digital photographs were in color. If you wanted black and white you could convert the files to monochrome. But few did. Including me.

I love and respect black and white and honor the vast body of work done in that medium, but I'm afraid I'm stuck with being a color photographer. As I look at my work I see hardly anything I shot in color that would be better in black and white.

In my heart I’m a globe-trotting, black and white film, Leica-shooting photojournalist in the mold of Elliott Erwitt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, or Josef Koudelka. But the bitter truth is that I am an autofocus, SLR, zoom lens, color photographer. That’s what I am, and I will just have to live with it.

Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins. "White Dress" copyright Judy and Tony King Foundation, 2022.)  

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

My book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, is now out of print, although copies are apparently still available from Amazon, and possibly other sources. The second edition is now in the editing stage and is scheduled to be published on December 6th.

Where Do My Pictures Come From?

Yugoslav peasant woman in church, 1990.

  

Where do my pictures come from? They come from assignments I am given, from book and magazine projects I am assigned or that I generate, from travel, both professional and personal, for Louise and I have been blessed to be prolific travelers; from occasional days of going out and looking for photographs, and from simply carrying a camera as I go about the daily rounds of my life and photographing whatever interests me. Most of all, I hope it is evident that my photographs come from my heart.

The photograph of an old peasant woman was made in a little church in what I think is now Bosnia in March, 1990, just a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Louise and I had been sent by the Church of God on a three-week tour of Eastern Europe to document the role of Christians in bringing about the breakup of the Soviet empire. You can read about it beginning here.

Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

My book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, is now out of print, although copies are apparently still available from Amazon, and possibly other sources. The second edition is now in the editing stage and is scheduled to be published on December 6th.

Louise Sees a Bear

This young bear chose the fork of a massive limb as a place to take a nap. As it happened, that spot was about 25 feet directly above the loop road that goes around Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

(Scroll down for more photos. Click on photo to enlarge.)

 

Louise has had a lifelong desire to see a bear in the wild up close and personal. Well, maybe not that close and that personal, but still. . .

Our 50th anniversary trip to Alaska was great, but with one flaw: we did not see a bear. Well, actually, we did see a couple of bears on the bus trip to Denali, but so far away that to the naked eye they were mere specks. You can read about it here.

So great was her disappointment that when we got home from Alaska we went to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and drove the Loop Road in Cades Cove several times. Did we see a bear? No.

So this past Monday we decided to make a day trip to Cades Cove. Just for fun. We eventually found ourselves at the end of a long line of very slow-moving traffic on the Loop Road. When we finally neared the head of the line we saw people getting out of their cars with cameras and cell phones and looking up into a tree that spread over the road. And in the fork of an enormous limb about 25 feet above us, a young bear, trying to take a nap and wondering what all the commotion was about.

A few minutes later as we finally drove away we saw another young bear running through a field about a hundred yards distant. Louise was happy. She had seen not one, but two bears. Close enough, but not too close.

My telephoto lens is broken, so I made these photos with the 16-50mm lens on my Fuji X-T20 and cropped them severely. That they still look quite good is a testimonial to the Fuji 24-megapixel sensor.

                      Waking up with a yawn. . .                        

     . . .he looks down in amazement. "What the heck. . .?     

  Maybe I should just go down and bite them!"

Photograph and text copyright 2022, David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone

My book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, is now out of print, although copies are apparently still available from Amazon, and possibly other sources. The second edition is now in the editing stage and is scheduled to be published on December 6th.