What colour is monochrome?

Visiting the Ansel Adams exhibition on Wednesday set me thinking. One thought, given the brilliance of his images, is why we bother with colour. His photos eclipse mine by a long way even though me best shots comprise a palette of thousands of colours and his are just, well, just variations in one tone. But what colour is his tone?

I noticed in an video clip of him making a photo he talks to his assistant (he operated a huge old fashioned plate camera, you'd need help lugging that around) about his Zone System exposure guide and placing black at certain values. So I think at the back of his mind he would say his images are in tones of black through to white. Except when you look at some and they have either no soot black and / or no snow whites. Beyond that, well, they don't look completely black rather than tones of gold or a mellow hue. Yes, some are obviously black - white, all are monotones, but some seem based on a tone other than simply 8 bit greyscale.

So that's what I've been thinking about as yesterday I scanned a batch of monotone prints. As a photo scanning service we want to get the best results and for a while I've believed the advice I was given when being trained to operate our first film scanner - that if the image isn't a colour negative or slide, it's black and white. The next step is to calibrate the scanner to capture all that it sees as digital values between total black and total white. Now this does add "pop" to an old image, and many clearly are b&w, but equally many have a tone, an element of blue, or gold, that suggests they may not have been intended to be variations of black.

Scanning these as b&w forces them down an avenue that may never have been intended. Scanning as colour captures the tones and gives a tech savvy client the option to render those as b&w should they wish. I'm more inclined to think we should scan all photos as colour even if they are obviously monotones.