Phil Parmet: Color Photography

From American Cinematographer, Still Lives, Distant Vistas by Andrew O. Thompson (Dec. 1998)

"There's something very compelling about the graphic quality of black-and-white photography. Color is very difficult to control and can be very distracting. Just look at great works of art that use color selectively. Accenting a huge canvas with a small piece of primary color-- like a red or blue-- against a field of pastels can exert an extraordinarily powerful pull on the eye. In cinema, you can control the palette with art direction, but there's no control over that in the real world for the documentarian and the still photographer. I have seen color photography that I love, but the idea of an image made up of silver on paper speaks more directly to me."

- Phil Parmet, Photographer

John Lindley: Shooting Color and B&W

From American Cinematographer, Black-and-White in Color by Bob Fisher (November 1998)

Lindley made several accommodations to shooting color film for conversion to black-and-white. He used hard light to get crisp separations in scenes with monochrome characters. He also used a dimmer control board for lighting transitions when a black-and-white person left an area and a color character moved in.

"The black-and-white characters would be hard-lit, even though they were occupying the same space where we had soft light on a color character. Almost every light was wired to a dimmer board. The operator watched a monitor with a live video feed from the tap on the camera. We did a lot of cues on the fly as people moved around sets.

Your eye naturally goes to color in a black-and-white world. If you pick up a newspaper that has one color photograph and a bunch of other black-and-white ones, everybody looks at the color one first. It's human nature."

- John Lindley, ASC

He further explains that the same dynamic applies when there are color and black-and-white characters in the same shot.

"That was great if [the black-and-white person] was the character Gary wanted to highlight. But if it was a two-shot and he wanted to feature both characters, I sometimes adjusted the composition to give the black-and-white person a little more prominence."

- John Lindley, ASC

Conrad Hall: Lighting to Draw Attention

From American Cinematographer, Leader of the Pack interview by Caleb Deschanel and edited by David E. Williams (September 1998)

Deschanel: Your lighting always feels real, but in many shots, there’s often light in a particular place that draws the eye to the key element in the story. It’s as if you’re using light to make the audience understand where to look in the frame.

Hall: Again, it’s like working on a canvas. I look through the ground glass and when I’m putting things together, I’m filling in the important aspects of the story which have to be told in that shot. Whether that means keeping the characters dark and lighting the background, or whatever else, the story is telling me to hide or illuminate something.