My journey with a color camera

I had the opportunity to loan a Leica M9-P color camera for a few weeks recently and I was excited to be able to capture some color again.
My own camera that I have been using for about eight months only captures luminance and tones and it is not capable of recording any color information at all.

I was excited and confused at the same time. I have learned to “see in black and white” over the last eight months and I rarely think about color – except when I use B&W color filters to enhance contrast, separation and tonality within a frame.

When I initially purchased my current camera – which is only capable to see the world in black and white – I did so because I enjoyed B&W photography much more than color photography – and I wanted to force myself to become better at B&W photography by totally excluding the possibility of recording color images.
And it worked. I feel that I have learned a whole lot from this small experiment. The ‘problem’, however, is the fact that I’ve learned that I really do prefer B&W images to color images in all cases. As you can see from the images posted in this article – there aren’t much color information here.

I tried to process the images below in color first but the images just didn’t please me at all. Something was missing! So after a few days of fiddling with different settings, presets, film looks and what-not, I tried B&W conversions of the images – and voila, the results were much better (for my eyes).
I guess I prefer seeing the world differently than how I see it every day myself.

The result from this is that I can conclude that my investment in a B&W only camera was the right one for me, and that I don’t miss color at all.