For thirty years, I’ve watched photographers chase colour. They chase the golden hour, the perfect saturation, the latest sensor’s color depth. And don’t get me wrong—I’ve chased it too. But after three decades in the darkroom and behind the screen, I keep coming back to one truth: black and white isn’t a lack of colour. It’s a presence of everything else.

I learned this first in the chemical stench of a cramped darkroom, under the glow of a red safelight. Back then, you didn’t “convert to monochrome.” You chose your film stock—Tri-X for grit, Panatomic-X for smoothness—and you committed. You pushed and pulled development, dodged and burned with your hands as the only undo button. Colour negatives felt chaotic to me. But black and white? That was structure. That was seeing light not as a property of an object, but as a subject in itself.

And that’s the power. Remove hue, and you’re left with geometry, texture, and—above all—tonality. A face in shadow becomes a landscape of greys. Rain on cobblestones becomes a symphony of silver. You stop photographing things and start photographing relationships: between highlights and shadows, between hard edges and soft gradients. Colour can distract you with the pretty. Black and white forces you to look at the truth.

In my film days, effectiveness meant craft. You had to pre-visualize—Ansel Adams’ zone system drilled into your bones. You had to know that a red filter would turn blue sky to charcoal and clouds to heaven. Mistakes cost you frames and chemistry. But they taught you discipline.

Now, with a mirrorless camera and a RAW file, the technology has exploded. I can see in live view what a deep orange filter will do before I shoot. I can push ISO to 6400 and get grain that looks like pushed HP5, not noise. Software lets me apply local adjustments that would have taken hours of masking with opaque red acetate. Some purists sneer. I don’t. The tool changes; the eye remains. What took me a night in the darkroom now takes sixty seconds. That doesn’t cheapen it—it liberates it. I can experiment, fail, and try again. The effectiveness comes faster, but the principles are the same: contrast, texture, the dance of light.

What hasn’t changed is the emotional voltage. A color shot of a crowded market is busy. A black and white version is a study in humanity. Without the noise of colour, the viewer’s brain fills the gaps with feeling. It’s why fine art, journalism, and portraiture still bow to monochrome. It feels simultaneously timeless and urgent.

So after thirty years—from fixing prints in a tray to tweaking curves on a tablet—I’ll tell you this: black and white isn’t retro. It isn’t a filter. It’s a way of seeing. And technology hasn’t replaced that vision; it’s just given it a sharper knife.