I recently read a post on a popular photography blog talking about how you should learn to ignore colour to be a better photographer. They weren’t talking about just black and white images either, they were talking about all photography. The idea that was put forward (and it’s not a new one) is that photography is primarily about light and shade and that colour is just a distraction. It was even suggested that if your camera has an EVF you switch to shooting in black and white so you can see through the EVF in monochrome, further enhancing your ability to ignore colour. While there are some merits to this approach, ignoring colour, in my opinion is not a good thing to do. While I’ve nothing against black and white photography and love shooting in black and white this isn’t about black and white. Learning to see light and shade is invaluable, but it’s important to realise that colour is as vital a component to photographic composition for colour photography as is light and shade. I know that sounds obvious, but there are some schools of thought that don’t see it that way. Colour is an important part of composition and ignoring it does not do justice to the medium. Rather than ignore colour learn to understand how it affects an image, and learn to see colour as an important part of the process……..

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compositional theory Thomas Fitzgerald