I had an epiphany about color vs. black and white while watch­ing Burn Notice. If you don’t know about the show, you should check it out. It’s like this decades A-Team/Remington Steele. A spy dis­avowed by his agency helps a new needy “client” each week. It’s mind­less TV fun at its best. Action and explo­sions with nary an indi­vid­ual get­ting hurt. But I digress. I’ve read all of these books about how some peo­ple pre­fer black and white over color because black and white has more inter­est­ing con­trast, shad­ing, and grayscale gra­di­ents. These books talked about how film­mak­ers of the past would use red lights and yel­low lights to cre­ate dif­fer­ent shades of gray on film. If you saw the scene lit in real life, it would look like a bad acid trip. But because all those col­ored lights turned to shades of gray on film, it just cre­ated an inter­est­ing play of con­trast and grayscale. As a film­maker that grew up in a world of color tv, where I Love Lucy reruns were annoy­ing because they didn’t have color, I’ve always felt too young to really appre­ci­ate black and white. And if I had the choice, I would have always cho­sen color. I mean, why would you choose mono audio over stereo? Strangely, I’ve always appre­ci­ated black and white pho­tog­ra­phy but hav­ing never seen the same pho­to­graph in color and B&W side by side, I’ve never had a true under­stand­ing of the differences.

But then while watch­ing the sea­son 4 episode of Burn Notice “Made Men”, a fade from color to B&W hit me like a ton of bricks and I finally get what peo­ple say about B&W. See, all the read­ing that I had done was too cere­bral. They were all just wordy expla­na­tions using high falutin art words. But what I saw on TV just got to me on an intu­itive level.

Burn Notice — Sea­son 4 Made Men — Color

Burn Notice — Sea­son 4 Made Men — B&W

To me, the color pic­ture has so much detail that your eye doesn’t pick out shapes. Your eye is draw more to col­ors and indi­vid­ual items as opposed to see­ing the com­po­si­tion as a whole. The best exam­ple of this is the big red siren on the cop car in the fore­ground. In the color pic­ture, you have white and red against a brown­ish gray street. The red pops out and draws your focus to the car. In the B&W ver­sion, the gray of the siren almost matches the street and it draws less atten­tion. Your eye is able to focus on the true sub­ject which are the four char­ac­ters in sil­hou­ette. In the B&W pic­ture, the car at the bot­tom, the white water at the top, and the dark under exposed side of the street on the right of the pic­ture cre­ate a frame for our sub­jects. All of these work together to draw your eye to the sil­hou­ettes and make a much more inter­est­ing com­po­si­tion. Even the sil­hou­ettes pop out more in B&W because they are a pure black against at lighter background. In the color ver­sion, the legs of the woman and the white shirt of the guy to the right of her get a lit­tle lost against the brown­ish gray street. This is prob­a­bly what all the experts mean when they talk about bet­ter con­trast in B&W. Overall, B&W made for a stronger and more dis­tinct com­po­si­tion. And there in a nut­shell is my epiphany on B&W.