This thread... smh tbh
>>2677098> I'll look retarded if I use it, or is it good and acceptableNeither, really. You'll better stick to what you better envision when photographing. And for most "street photography" it is way easier to envision the image caring only for the non-coloured factors, such as composition, framing, depth-of-field etc. Working intuitively with coloured factors such as color dynamic, colour contrast etc is hard as fuck, and very few photographers master this (to name a few: Miguel Rio branco, Ernst haas, Luigi Ghirri). Sebastião Salgado has a very short but very good talk on this, but, sadly, only available is portuguese (here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sM4xL4g_62M).
Please note there are others factors that b/w convey emotionally that colour does not, and vice-versa. To exemplify, if you watched "Salt of the Earth", remember that scene when someone say that already had seen many photos from Serra Pelada, from many photographers, but mostly in color; then he saw the pictures Salgado took, all b/w, long tonal scale, and then perceived what could've been the construction of the Gize pyramids, the magnificent scale. I won't go further on this but if you are interest on what emotional factors these could be, I highly recommend watching Tarkovsky movies (Mirror, Stalker, Sacrifice), and notice what happens when he transits from colour-to-sepia-to-bw-to-colour etc. It is a great visual experience, not to mention how good these films are.
(when I talk about emotion, please consider the word closer to its origins, "ex movere", and consider the relation of the idea of motion to that of composition).
All of this, of course, applies only to those who care about the 'artistical' value on your photographs, which is neither necessary nor always a good thing to do.
For instance, someone working with commercial portraiture will not be free to always do what he wants, as the final picture is not made for...
