... but that doesn't mean a photo can't be. I mean, I have personally been skeptical of black and white photography. If color photography had been invented first, would anyone have ever thought about black and white? I doubt it.
But lately I have come to appreciate the art of black and white photography and have turned more and more of my own pictures into black and white shots. What happened was that I realized black and white wasn't just black and white. Black and white can have as many different expressions as color photography. I discovered this when I installed Google's Nik Collection after Google started to offer this otherwise expensive software for free. Apart from well-known post-processing tools such as noise-reduction and sharpening, Nik Collection includes a tool called Silver Effect Pro that is basically an advanced black and white converter. And you don't even have to use the advanced options. The presets are usually enough to blow my mind and do the job for me.
So below are some of my own favorite black and white shots, all made using Silver Effect Pro, and with a feeble attempt to explain what, in my opinion, makes them work in black and white.
I think this was the picture that opened my eyes to the power of black and white. In color, a rather bleh image of a neighborhood development, in black and white... something, to me, much more powerful.
A picture I took at a Bruce Springsteen concert in Copenhagen in 2016. In this case, I think the black and white style makes an otherwise very detailed image more soothing for the brain.
This abandoned cabin in Montana was a slam-dunk, I thought. But I just couldn't get it right in post-processing due to the colors just being completely uninteresting. So what do you do? Remove the colors, of course. That hit the nail on the head.
The black and white here helped erase the difference between the car and nature and thus emphasizing nature reclaiming its materials. I could never have done that in color.
Another example of a picture that just didn't work very well in color, because the colors were just kind of blah. Still not for everyone I guess, but I like it.
I posted a color version of this in my "Best of November" post, but I actually think it works even better in black and white. Technically and artistically one I'm rather proud of.