Personally, B&W is my favourite colour scheme. My daughter on the other hand, thinks all B&W photos are creepy.
It’s possible I’d feel the same way about colour had I learnt how to process my own colour film from scratch as I did with B&W. I think my love of black and white hails from many hours spent in a darkroom and the appreciation of just what an art it is to create your own B&W image.
Despite the many, many amazing paths that digital photography carves for us, I miss the thrill of winding my own roll of film. Of making sure the back of the camera does not somehow open before the film is wound back.
I miss counting down hours until I could get into the darkroom to feed that film into a reel and drown it in solution. Waiting for that film to dry before getting busy with an enlarger and then the absolute anticipation while watching that image slowly appear on paper just below the surface of the developer, wondering if you’d got it right or if it would need to be done again.
Draining away the colour seems to leave just the raw emotion in an image and to me this makes the image seem more alive.
