Just a Little More Colour
When you spend most of your time seeing the world in black and white, switching to colour can feel like entering an entirely different dimension. Black and white photography encourages a kind of visual attention to light, shape, contrast, and texture that often gets softened or overshadowed in the presence of colour. Without the emotional pull of hues, you rely more on structure, mood, and timing to make an image speak.
But shooting colour doesn’t just mean adding back what you’ve left out—it’s an entirely different way of seeing.
The first thing you notice when shooting colour after a long stretch in monochrome is the sudden weight of colour. It doesn’t just sit in the frame quietly as it pulls, pushes, distracts, sometimes even overwhelms. A red coat, a green wall, a pale blue sky compete for attention in a way that tonal range never does. What was once a clean composition in black and white can feel chaotic or flat when colour enters the picture. It forces you to recalibrate, to ask different questions: What’s the emotional temperature of this image? What colour story am I telling? Is the subject still the subject?
If you’re patient, you start to feel the rhythm of it. You begin to see colour, not just as information, but as atmosphere, tension, or harmony. You find yourself chasing that one patch of light that turns a mundane moment.
Interestingly, coming from black and white gives you a kind of edge. You’re already trained to shoot with intention. You’re used to stripping away, to making hard choices about what belongs in the frame. That mindset doesn't disappear it simply adapts. You start to treat colour not as the default, but as a powerful design element. And when you do that, even the simplest scenes take on a new depth.
Ultimately, switching to colour is less about abandoning black and white and more about expanding your vision. You’re not changing who you are as a photographer you’re just learning a new language.
And sometimes, in the middle of a chaotic, oversaturated world, you find a moment of colour that sings as quietly and powerfully as any black and white frame.
