Movement

Great still photos can stop motion in such a way that the still picture suggests the motion as active yet frozen. At times the removal of hues and tints allows the shades of gray to highlight the motion, captured at its peak. What is supposed to move is the eye of the viewer, pulling his or her imagination along with it.
Our next post will begin a new topic.

Contrast

Sometimes it is the relative simplicity of grayscale which allows the eye of the viewer to see the contrast between elements more clearly. Here we see a pair of images that are strong and successful in full color but which gain simple, timeless power without the hues and tints.

Not Black-and-White

Images we have always called 'black-and-white' have been called that incorrectly since the medium was begun over 150 years ago. Look closely at these images and you might notice that all the colors of the spectrum are represented in the photo . . . often excepting only full-out black and full-out white. You have seen images in black and white, of course, but the term for that is 'silhouette.'
Greyscale in the term that works best, with all colors being represented by shades of grey on a scale between the rarest of colors, total black or total white.
No more vocabulary, for now, just a few more greyscales.

Shades of Gray

Once upon a time, in a previous century, photography required a medium called 'film,' which is now a relative rarity since the advent and growth of digital imagery. I sometimes joke about seeing someone on the street changing film in a camera and suggesting I took a picture of him or her . . . "it was like seeing Abraham Lincoln walking down the street."
This blog is digital, of course. In my mind there is no pressing need to return to the dark ages of film. Virtually anything that can be done on film can be done digitally, but much of the power of digital is not adaptable to film. For the next few days, our photos will hark back to a decision we digital shooters no longer need to make: do I shoot color or black-and-white? With digital, we always shoot color but can easily post-process our images into what was once considered the only art of photography. Ansel Adams shot black-and-white, right? Here are a couple of shots presented in the honored monochrome format. Glassware in a window and bursts of fireworks change their visual nature completely, don't they?
We will discuss the very term 'black-and-white' in the next post.