Black and white, or colour, madam?

The story behind these two portraits began a long time ago. I’ve been waiting quite a few years to add something of mine to it.

Sparkly's sister Karen was a student at an Art College in Cheltenham in the Sixties. Back then, a photographer made a monochrome portrait of her, in a lighting style I deliberately reproduced for this photo of her daughter Ruby, who is today much the same age as her mum was when the original image came into being. It’s my practical way of showing the importance of photography as a social documentary tool, recording, as it does in such high fidelity, events separated by time and space.

A colour variation is also here, partly by way of comparison. One of the questions I often ask about the medium is “Do we react differently to black and white photographs?"

It illustrates too how contemporary cameras have changed photographic working methods. In times bygone, I’d have chosen a particular combination of film, developer and printing paper, processing them, chemically, in a darkroom, physically manipulating the contrast and tonal range I needed to create. That whole technical workflow would have differed completely when making a colour print. But nowadays, shooting digitally, the camera instantly records the subject fully. Black and white has become almost an afterthought, merely one choice made from a virtually infinite number of possibilities. Creative decisions can be delayed, reductions achieved through discarding some of the stored data by employing a few software tools.

I prefer to call my new working environment a Lightroom. It seems more fitting. And when summer comes, I can open the window, to let a breath of fresh air in amongst the pixels.