Seeing differently

I was diagnosed as colourblind when I was at school. Like many young lads, I wanted to be a pilot, so this was pretty devastating. I became disinterested with school, and just coasted through for the majority of the time. In my later school years, they were offering the chance to learn photography. This was before digital photography, so it was mostly shooting on black and white film, and developing it in the school darkroom. I was really taken with the mixture of science and black magic that goes into producing a print this way, and even tried more experimental techniques such as solarisation. In those days I mostly shot portraits, because as a 17 year old with no social skills I thought it was a good way to meet girls (it wasn’t). Shooting in black and white my colour blindness didn’t hold me back. After leaving school I built a little darkroom at home and continued shooting.

Then came digital. Almost overnight film became redundant. I lived in a small town, so my local camera shop could now only stock a few different film stocks, mostly colour. Darkroom supplies were incredibly difficult to get hold of too, especially as this was before the Internet really took off. I felt that the results I saw from digital cameras were very poor compared to film. It was a triumph of convenience over quality. I hadn’t long switched from the Praktica that I learnt on to a Nikon, but once my stock of photo paper ran out I put my camera away and never got it out again.

Fast forward a few years, and I became very ill. It was possibly the best thing that happened to me. I re-evaluated my life, and decided I needed to follow more creative pursuits. I picked up a cheap Nikon DSLR, got a Lightroom subscription, and started shooting. While I knew it would take a while to learn how to create images on a PC instead of dodging and burning while half high on fixer fumes, something else became clear from my photos. I was dealing with colour images for the first time. While there were the obvious issues of green tones being edited wrong, I also found that I really didn’t connect with the colours in the image. Even the colours that aren’t affected by my colourblindness could be off, simply because I didn’t really care about the colours. What really mattered was to me was the textures, tones, and contrast. I started editing more in monochrome, which I connected with more. I did some research, and I found it’s not unusual for colourblind people to have this switch from an emotional connection to colour to connecting more with tone. From there my enjoyment of photography increased significantly. Everything I shot I had a black and white image in mind. I watched hours of videos about editing in monochrome. Over time I developed my own process for getting the results I wanted, especially as I switched editing software to find different approaches. I now have a process that gives me results that match how I think about the tones and textures I see. I have accepted that I see differently, and that it’s a good thing.