Color and Black and White
One reason the Venice picture works in color is that it has organized its subject in terms of color and in relation to two of the primary colors, red and yellow (there's true yellow in the two posts to the far right and some of the orange passages tend toward yellow as opposed to red); there's also a lot of green scattered here and there. In other words, it's a rich palette picture and the many variations on each of the principal colors keeps the surface active: Every time the eye moves from one area to another it meets something new if not in shape then in hue or value.
The picture was conceived in color. This is one reason it doesn't work in black and white.
Black and white photography is strictly a form of monochrome drawing, part of that family of drawing that includes drawings in pencil, ink, charcoal, Conte crayon and chalk; it is also within that family of works on paper that includes monochrome engravings, etchings and lithographs.
The last half of the 18th century saw many important black and white etchings of Venice, the most notable being those of Canaletto, and beautiful drawings, especially Guardi's. But John Neville's color photograph, although it has much of Canaletto's solemnity and sense of ceremony and some of Guardi's occasional appreciation of the sole figure against the backdrop of the city, is not conceived in terms of lines and forms as much as it is in terms of masses and patches of color, relating to each other across the surface.
In other words, it falls within the realms of watercolor (drawing), multi-colored printmaking and painting.
Digital photography makes it too easy to work in color. With most digital cameras, photographers who review their pictures on the LCD shortly after they take them are forced to see them in color. Although converting large bodies of work (e.g. many days' pictures taken in a distant place, or a day's work for those who shoot 200 - 300 frames/day) is not difficult it is time consuming and tends to discourage working in black and white.
We might soon be in a situation in which photographers accept color as the default medium instead of what it should be, a conscious choice over black and white. This, in turn, will undermine any photographer who does not devote him/herself to the same long systematic study of color theory, of color composition, of the inter-action of colors, etc. -- subjects that all painters must master. It's a long haul. In most art schools, color is a major field of study, beginning with foundation courses in two- and three-dimensional design (first year) and continuing on through color theory and composition. Teachers of advanced undergraduate and of graduate painting courses assume a knowledge of color theory on the part of their students and bring it to bear always in the critique of their students' work.
Without devoting ourselves to a similar course of study, we photographers don't really stand much of a chance of accomplishing anything noteworthy in the field of color pictures.
There are many excellent books on the subject and many community colleges teach color theory courses.
Two digital cameras make it easy to work in black and white, for they display the monochrome image on their respective LCD screens and their software enables one to edit in black and white.
These are the Epson R-D1 and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX1PP or the Leica version of it, the D-Lux... Or D-Lux 2? I forget. I use the both the R-D1 and the Lumix in part because they let me shoot in black and white.
Because my R-D1 is being repaired, I just used the Lumix, together with the Canon 10D, during a 10-day photographic trip in the Philippines. For various reasons, I favored the Lumix and made an average of 150 black and white pictures with it per day, and about 200 on the flight home, starting with the 2-hour wait in the Manila International Airport and ending with the 2-hour wait, in Penn Station, New York, for the AmTrak to Connecticut.
Both the Manila-San Francisco and the San Francisco-JFK flights were at night. The Lumix did beautifully in the low cabin light. Image stabilization let me work at around 1/3 second and the small unobtrusive camera, which looks more like a point-and-shoot than a serious instrument, made people -- especially the filipinos -- just shrug their shoulders at the strange Western tourist who photographs everything, even to the extent that he walks up and down the aisles of his airplane at night, in his stocking feet, photographing his fellow passengers asleep or awake. Nobody so much as asked what I was doing, not on the planes and not in the baggage claim area, JFK, where I made about 50 exposures of mostly US fellow passengers.
It's a marvelous little camera. Glue an accessory or hot shoe from an old camera onto the top of it, use Voigtlander accessory optical finders; put it in manual focus mode to set the depth of field; count on the extremely deep depth of field even at wide apertures; and you can use it like a Leica with the lens set to hyperfocal settings.
And, of course, going back and forth between its color and monochrome modes you can begin to see whether your present talent is for black and white or for color, and develop it as such.
And no matter which medium you're working in, somewhere along the line you can use this same camera to begin your study of the other medium.
Given the Leitz lens and the three aspect ratios you can shoot in -- 2:3 (the standard 35mm frame); 3:4 (great for landscapes and portraits); and the near panoramic 6:19 (close to the aspect ratio of the contemporary wide movie screen) -- and the fact that it can be used in RAW, this is a great small camera, an extraordinary instrument for the serious photographer, and at a modest price to boot.