A Splash of Color Street Photos From a B&W Photographer

I love Black & White photography. I love it so much, around ten years ago I started a Facebook Group called "I Love Black & White Photography." It currently has approximately 28,000 members. I love how B&W reduces a photo to its graphic essence and removes distractions (sometimes a bright red background just pulls the eye away from an important human interaction). 

B&W is the photographic pallate that my heroes used--but given the state of color photography in their day, they didn't have much choice. Winogrand said as much. He did some color photography the percentage of his work in color is minuscule. Cartier-Bresson also stayed away from color because it was too slow. 

One of the great things about digital photography is you can decide about color vs. B&W after you shoot the picture. You can even set your digital camera to shoot B&W JPEGs plus RAW files, which will preserve the color information. I don't think HCB, Winogrand or the others would have objected to having this option if it had been available to them. A bonus: Modern digital cameras are able to capture outstanding images at most ISOs. In the film era, street photographers would push their Tri-X to ISO 800-1600 and get grainy results. Digital images in this range are very low in noise by comparison. 

All of the above is my long-winded way of saying that while I love the esthetics of B&W, I am also allowing my final results to be in color more often these days. As Mark Mermelstein has said, "we see in color, we should take pictures in color." So, here's a small selection of color street photos I've taken in New York City fairly recently.