by
Ryan Clement
There is someone I follow on social media because I enjoy his photographic work. Most of the pictures I have seen from him are in black and white. A few months ago, I published a black and white photograph that I took at the City of Arts & Sciences in Valencia, Spain, and he complimented it. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t chuffed, being a humble lawyer.
Rather than leave it there, I went back to him and asked about his preference. What he said was quite profound, and I understood it straight away. In a nutshell, he was saying that colour can get in the way of the picture; when an image is in black and white, you focus on the picture itself rather than on the colours around it.
It was one of those comments that made sense to me immediately. I think that may be why I appreciate black and white photography: colour can be memorable when it is exceptional, but often it is here today and gone tomorrow. The underlying image, however, can stay with you.
I tested that idea recently with Santorini, which many people know as an exceptionally beautiful place. I cannot say whether it is one of the most beautiful places on the planet because I have not been everywhere, but it is certainly striking. I wanted to see whether it would remain equally beautiful in black and white, so I made a short video mixing colour with black and white.
One of my followers on YouTube commented that the black and white version really worked, and in my view it did too. That told me something simple: irrespective of the lens, some places are inherently beautiful.
The same may be true of people. Irrespective of how different they may appear, people can be inherently beautiful if we take the time to know them, understand their cultures (if different from one’s own), appreciate their differences, and celebrate those differences rather than judging them only through the lens we already have. Oops! Trust me, I’m a lawyer, I did not set out to end on this note; this thought just came to me, and I’m trying not to preach. But perhaps that is the point: sometimes the image becomes clearer when we remove distractions that can colour our views!
Tomorrow, I shall publish my blog about Liverpool. Not the football team; it is well documented, not least by me, that I support the team from Anfield. This one is about my walk around the city. My video on that walk will be released on my travel social media sites at 9am tomorrow (13 August 2026). I must confess, I thought long and hard about making it because, aside from my legal work, people are familiar with my writing and making videos about travel spots such as the Greek and Caribbean islands and beyond.
I researched what others had to say, and there were mixed views. Still, I thought: why not? People travel to London to see the sights, which, as a Londoner, I rarely visit unless I must. I easily walk past many of its landmarks without giving them a first or second glance. The same must surely be true for locals when I visit Paris, Rome, Valencia, and many other places. When I walked the streets of Liverpool, which I already know reasonably well, there were many tourists doing likewise in the same way I might have done had I been in another country, whatever its AKA: The Big Apple, The Eternal City, Sin City, The Floating City, The City of Love etc. You get my point!
Until tomorrow, watch this space!
Copyright © Ryan Clement 2026
Ryan Clement 