Fun with black and white

Snowy footprints

snow walkers

Dead Deer

For comparison, here is a side-by-side with the original color version

This is one of those pictures that I think works either way. In the color version, you get to see the detail of the dead eye, the tongue, the sand beneath the animal. In the black and  white one you're more forced to look at the deer's face, instead of looking at a dead deer on a beach.

This one is kind of interesting, and I will offer this disclaimer: no, that's not snow, although it does look an awful lot like it.

Prints of these pictures are available here

Now the lengthy writing portion:

What images work as black and white and what work as color? I think it varies depending on the picture. You just have to get a feel for the picture. The deer picture, for example, is a picture I like in black and white and color, but I think the snow footprint works better in black and white.

Whats my criteria for something that should be black and white and what should be color? 

I don't have a specific criteria for what should be black and white. I've only intentionally shot in black and white once, and it was because I was in an artsy-fartsy mood and had gotten my first digital camera. Nowadays, I won't know what pictures I want in black and white until I go to review a whole batch. Even then, I usually just play around with the photos in the editing phase, and some just look better in black and white than they did in color.

What aspects make them as strong as they can?

I myself like high-contrast black and white photos, because I think they make you look at the picture as a whole, instead of focusing on the subject of the photo; you aren't distracted by color, so you have to look at shapes, lines, and shadows. The top picture, for example, could be looked at as a picture of a footprint in the snow, but I think the black and white version gives the picture a completely different feel.

How does the photo communicate in what you put it as? 

I'm not sure how to go about answering that question. I guess that's probably because I don't know what I'm trying to communicate through my pictures, other than that I think they were really cool looking pictures when I was done editing them, or that I thought they would make a good picture when I took them. I could be all lofty and cerebral and say things like "with the picture of the deer I am communicating the base simplicity of life, that we are reduced to something plain and flat when we die as our vital essence that makes us who we are is no longer in our bodies" but that wasn't what I was thinking when I took the picture. I found this dead deer on the beach, thought it was cool to find such an untouched carcass, with an intact eye and the tongue kind if bulging out.