Being subtle

One thing I like in photography is a kind of a subdued tone to things. I'm willing to take garishly colored photos, as much as anybody, I guess. I don't think you can be a serious photographer and not love color. But, some people choose to work in black and white. I like to work in colors, but those that are more subtle gradations.

Here are two shots I took that illustrate this. The one was taken last Christmas, in Prosser, Washington. I didn't mute the color at all with the camera, nor did I tinker with the color afterwards. It's the fog that does it all. The only real color in the photo is on the wreath, with the red bow and the slight read of the binder twine that ties it to the post.

The second shot is simply a flashlight embedded in the snow in my front yard. You can tell it's a color shot by the blue tint of the snow and the yellow in the light cone, but it's just barely there.

Left behind

Here's a photo I took at the slough west of Logan, Utah. The old boat had served well, and was now left to rot.

Presenting illustrations

There are a number of ways of presenting illustrations. For print media, they are --in descending order of desirability -- 1) line drawings; 2) shaded drawings; 3) grayscale photos; and 4) color photos. I rate drawings higher than photos because it’s easy to eliminate noise – you simply don’t put it in. Line drawings are also better than shaded drawings because they reproduce well in all sorts of formats. Sling a line drawing on a copier and you get a crisp copy; do the same with a shaded drawing and it’s liable to turn out patchy. I like black and white photos better than color because of the same thing – if you reproduce a color photo as black and white on a copier, you lose definition.
With the advent of PhotoShop and other software, it’s much easier to manipulate photos, of course. The problem there is that you run into ethical and sometimes legal issues, especially if the photo is not yours or if the content is compromised by the manipulation. So, I prefer to keep it simple when possible and use line drawings. Since we’re talking about photography, though, we’ll simply pretend that drawings don’t exist,
For electronic media, most of what I said above still holds, except that you needn’t worry about color in terms of reproduction, so color and grayscale will swap places. The only problem with color in this context is the fact that color hue and intensity will vary from screen to screen, so you can’t be subtle. Use strong tones.

Noise

One of the concepts from information theory that I think is crucial to successful photography is that of noise. In information theory, you have information and you have noise. Noise is anything that is not information. “Big deal,” you say. But hearken. Noise is not only non-information, it is a subtractive quantity. That is, it interferes with the amount of information that any channel can carry. It does this by distracting your attention from the important content. Indeed, in some cases, noise becomes ambiguous and we can’t tell what’s information and what’s not; what’s important and what’s not.
Look at the photograph, which is from the Utah Historical Society archives, and depicts a race car on the Bonneville Salt Flats. Notice all the elements which draw attention away from the important feature, which is (I assume) the man fiddling with the wheel well: the car in the upper center, the disembodied legs and hands and bellies. All these things are noise, and make the picture very messy.