Status-Q

It's strange, but not many of my photos end up in black and white.

I'm not sure why - I do really like monochrome images, and it's an instant way to make almost any shot look more 'arty'. Maybe that's the problem: somehow it feels as if I'm hiding something - not capturing the beauty inherent in the world sufficiently well in colour, so I have to do something artificial - turn on the 'arty' switch to make it a bit more pretentious...

This is, of course, rubbish. Our eyes are more sensitive, in most ways, to brightness than they are to colour, and you could argue, therefore, that you are capturing the essence of a scene with fewer distractions if you do so in monochrome. It doesn't bother me that I'm only capturing it in 2D. Why should I hesitate when it comes to discarding another dimension? Perhaps it's really that I'm not very good at it! I wonder, though... If Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson could have worked in accurate colour from the start, would they have done so? And would there then be such a strong tradition of black and white in art photography?

Now, from very early on, digital cameras have had various 'modes' into which you can switch them to get different effects. Serious photographers avoid these, preferring to capture as pure an image as possible and do any manipulation later 'in post', where you have a great deal more choice and control than you do on the camera. In particular, the option to take pictures in a 'black and white' mode seemed very silly to me from the moment it appeared on my very first digital camera. Why throw away data as soon as you take the photo, and deny yourself the chance of changing your mind and using colour?

My main current camera is a Lumix GH2, and I've been enjoying combining this bit of high-tech kit, via an adaptor, with the old 50mm Olympus Zuiko lens I had as a teenager. (It's a nice side-benefit of the micro-four-thirds format that you can find adaptors for all sorts of lenses.) Anyway, this retro, all-manual operation set me thinking about such things again today, and I realised that something fundamental had changed since my first rejection of such frivolities as black-and-white mode...

I now shoot everything in RAW.

What this means is that all the data actually captured by the sensor is saved, regardless of any manipulations the camera may have been told to make at the time. So, I tried switching on the black and white mode for the first time, and found it quite an interesting experience, because the LCD viewfinder then shows you, as you're composing the shot, roughly what your image would look like if you chose to keep it in black and white. This makes you look at the scene in a different way, think more about contrast than colour, without committing you to B&W as the final output. (Unlike the new Leica Monocchrome: for a little over £6000 you can get a camera that only shoots black and white.) It was a grey, overcast day today, so not very exciting lighting conditions, but I may experiment more with this in future.

It is also, I think, quite fun that only digital cameras can do this: only now can you get a preview, as you're shooting, of the results you would have had to get before there was even colour film!

Under the Vesari Corridor, Florence.

I like shutters. Why do we have so few of them in Britain?

These are on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence.

Rough…

and refined…

Giambologna's splendid sculpture of The Rape of the Sabine Women, carved from a single block of marble.

(The Wikipedia article points out that 'rape' here chiefly means abduction, rather than its more modern emphasis, and suggests that it might actually have been quite a good deal for the women concerned...)

We used to think Venice was crowded until we spent a week in Florence. The great thing about Venice, especially at this time of year, is that you can step off the main thoroughfares and get lost in peaceful (and often pretty) backwaters. In Florence, the areas that aren't crowded are often empty for a good reason.

The best way to see the popular spots in Florence, we discovered this morning, is to do it before about 8 a.m.

In the last week I've walked and cycled many miles around Florence, on the ubiquitous slate-grey stone with which its streets are paved. They cut nice textures into it to make sure it doesn't become too slippery in adverse weather conditions.

But I have walked on this stone before, in many cities around the world, and in a finely-polished form, because it is used as the flooring material in Apple's retail stores.

Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs describes how this came about:

In 1985, as he was being ousted from his first tour at Apple, he had visited Italy and been impressed by the gray stone of Florence's sidewalks. In 2002, when he came to the conclusion that the light wood floors in the stores were beginning to look somewhat pedestrian -- a concern that it's hard to imagine bedeviling someone like Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer -- Jobs wanted to use that stone instead. Some of his colleagues pushed to replicate the color and texture using concrete, which would have been ten times cheaper, but Jobs insisted that it had to be authentic. The gray-blue Pietra Serena sandstone, which has a fine-grained texture, comes from a family-owned quarry, Il Casone, in Firenzuola outside of Florence. "We select only 3% of what comes out of the mountain, because it has to have the right shading and veining and purity," said Johnson. "Steve felt very strongly that we had to get the color right and it had to be a material with high integrity." So designers in Florence picked out just the right quarried stone, oversaw cutting it into the proper tiles, and made sure each tile was marked with a sticker to ensure that it was laid out next to its companion tiles. "Knowing that it's the same stone that Florence uses for its sidewalks assures you that it can stand the test of time," said Johnson.

The Italians certainly know how to transport people efficiently in and out of cities.

I must have a mischievous turn of mind, though, because I keep thinking about dominoes...