Before there was color photography, there was black-and-white photography. Before national magazines were published with nothing but color photos, they used to run a color photo on the cover and a few color photos sprinkled through the rest of the magazine. Everything else was black-and-white. Let's go way back: The shiny-and-dark image of the Dauguerreotype was essentially, a black-and-white image. So too, the brown-and-white albumen print, the muted tones of the calotype and even the murky image of tintypes. Most of the history of the first hundred plus years of photography was etched in monochromatic tones– a photograph was a two-dimensional rendering of light and dark patches that created a black-and-white likeness of a real-world scene. Sometimes the dark portions were dark gray and black, other times dark brown and deep brown (sepia). Even in the past fifty years, there have been lots of reasons to use black-and-white film. Early color film, processing and printing was expensive– much more expensive than black-and-white. Worse still, the quality of the images was often poor, particularly from low-cost labs used by amateurs. This was because the film wasn't so hot, the processing (except for very high-end magazine and advertising work) was shaky, and the volume wasn't there. For pros, only some jobs called for color images, the majority of photographs that were reproduced in print-even on television-were black and white. Color reproduction in magazines and books was usually poor right up to the 1970s or early 1980s. Sometimes it was downright lousy. Today, we live in a full-color world. For photo viewers, even the color photos in newspapers are pretty good. Color images in magazines, books, and– gasp!– television too, are usually crisp and well-balanced. For the makers of photographs, including the amateur photo enthusiast and even the family snapshot photographer, today's color films and prints are reasonably priced and better than ever. For the pro, almost every customer wants color, and the exquisite films and quality processing and printing that is available allows us to produce photos that drip with eye-popping color. When that's appropriate. The result of this full-color media world is that today many photographers shoot everything in color. Along the way to this full-color media world (starting around 1975-1980) there was an unintended consequence. The use of black-and-white film plummeted. There were many reasons: Manufacturers were offering better color film and processing at lower prices, while fewer and fewer commercial processors could do a good job processing black-and-white film. It even became hard to buy black-and-white film! The result? The creation of black-and-white images dropped precipitously. In little over a decade, black-and-white went from a basic photographic commodity to something that was a chore to purchase and tough to get processed. Lots of photographers, as we'll discuss in a moment, stuck with black-and-white in recent times and continue to produce fantastic work in that medium. The people who have suffered are the ones who got excited about photography in the past ten to fifteen years. If you took up photography since say, 1985, there's a danger you haven't really had the fun of working with black-and-white film and getting good results. That's a real loss. But it's an understandable situation. After all, if you have to work hard to buy black-and-white film, if you can't get someone else to process it, and if you can't easily buy the gear you would need to do the job yourself, then you would have to really be devoted to black-and-white images to learn how to make them and to keep making them. And, if you never learned how to do it in the first place, how can you keep the tradition alive? B&W Photography History || B&W Photography is coming back B&W Photography is educational || B&W Photography in films
