Life is rarely black and white

Chris and Daytonas alternate gallery

So Chris and Daytona received their gallery in colour with a few black and white (B&W) images but personally I’d like to do more for clients – hopefully even an entire album in B&W, it is a brilliant medium and I’d like to include more of it for my clients.

One of the key things that professional photographers do is to make the proverbial story of a thousand words in one decisive moment. I can’t emphasise the importance of that enough, each image needs to tell you something and a lot of what we do is decide what to keep in an image and what is a distraction.

Colour plays an important part in telling a story but it can compliment a photo or it can be really distracting. Colours evoke different feelings – red is a dynamic colour signalling passion and heat etc, blue evokes a sense of cool calm, green – nature etc and so the list goes on.

To my mind, the reason why B&W is so powerful is because our brain does not see the colour and lets us look at the person as they are in their moment – free from distraction.

It is important to also emphasise that I work closely with my clients to work out what their tastes in photography are, I want my clients to LOVE their photos and I think it is a recipe for disaster to ignore a clients tastes and deliver them something they don’t love.