I stopped taking black and white photos a long time ago, because for me, bw is now something like a filter, photoshop or whatever they call it, preset, etc. Real black&white photography is physics, that is, a film where silver crystals interact with photons of light and, to one degree or another, with different color wavelengths.
Everything else is not serious enough and amounts to a game (I wanted to say, pampering). By seriousness, I mean the documentality of the scene being shot.
Any intentional artificial color distortion deprives the image of its documentary quality. Nothing will give the maximum authenticity of the plot like a full-color image. Converting a color image to black and white is equivalent to how photographers try to make something more interesting out of a boring picture.
I think that zen in photography is to shoot well right away so that you don't have to process it.
Again, I'm talking about documentary photography genres, not creative metaphysical ones. There is a lot to talk and argue about documentality, because even the phenomenon itself, like presets and filters, will be a document of time, but I don't want to focus on this.
Actually, the film makers were still photoshoppers! Browse through Soviet magazines about photography – there will be a bunch of recipes on how to give a picture an increased contrast or, conversely, make the picture (print) softer.
Light color and light correction is not an interference with the documentary. The closest thing to a black-and-white film photography is shooting immediately in bw in jpeg without the possibility of color restoration. It's like on film!
It is even possible to install ostensibly light filters of different colors that cut off waves of one color or another.
So, over time, I got closer to documentality in my pictures, where I stopped distorting colors and even the plot itself, so bw became something from another opera for me.
You might say that the camera is already distorting, perceiving reality differently from the human eye. But modern cameras have brought the picture closer to the maximum possible transmission of the real world, so why change anything?
Some photographers try to get rid of parasitic shades due to imperfections in optics or matrix, while others deliberately add presets with altered tones that do not exist in nature.
There are so many unusual, interesting, and even absurd things in the world around us that it's enough just to take it off as it is.
PS: This is my personal opinion, which may not coincide with the opinions of other photographers.
PS: For some reason, there is such a frequency of photographers who believe that the street should be in the bw...
