By Gary Fong
Photographer: Russ Taylor, www.nomadruss.com
Click photos to enlarge
 

Figure 1                                                  Figure 2

 
It shouldn’t be surprising how much color, influences a viewer’s appreciation of an image. In some cases, it’s the only element that makes the picture.

Russ Taylor’s recent entries in the www.wearephotographers.com  “From Your Archives”contest, gave us an enlightened look into how a simple color palette sets the story tempo of a picture (Figure 1 and 2).

His photos are simple, pleasing to the eye, or stands in stark contrast to the subject.

Now for the Nit Picking

An image with very subtle humor can be lost without the contrast of content or color (Figure 3 and 4). The pastel color is a major element in this particular image, causing it to stand out above many.  Without the pink background, it blends into hundreds of pictures I’ve seen this week.
 

Figure 3                                             Figure 4

In color, the isolated hand is almost too subtle. It could be easily missed. In B&W - converted by us, it’s almost completely overlooked.  

In this particular image, why does the color make a big difference?  It’s due to the intersecting point of the pink wall, with the pastel blue square. It points the view right to the hand…which lands in a compositional crash point.

In B&W, the colors are almost the same gray scale, which neutralize each color’s impact.  They no longer contrast…but melt into each other.

If one looked at Taylor’s two other photos in B&W, they’d be appreciated differently.  If I were to put them in order of preference, I would say in “color”, (Figure 1, Figure 2 and (Figure 3).  But in B&W, would order them as (Figure 2, Figure 1, and a very distant, if at all, Figure 3).

I would think Taylor should keep shooting his outstanding color…not worry about B&W.