Vintage petrol station

[mugge]

This abandoned petrol station was opposite a modern supermarket just opened recently. The country town has 1600 inhabitants now and is quite prosperous.

I have two versions one in monochrome and the other in colour. My preference is monochrome because it harks back to the time the petrol station was operating. C&C most welcome.

Vintage petrol station by Ole Hansen, on Flickr

Vintage petrol station by Ole Hansen, on Flickr

[pschlute]

This is a dilemma for me. I love b+w pictures and before I examined them both I thought I would concur with your thoughts. But the colour version does show the flaking paint better in my view, and overall I think I prefer it. Very close call though.

[Duc]

This is a dilemma for me. I love b+w pictures and before I examined them both I thought I would concur with your thoughts. But the colour version does show the flaking paint better in my view, and overall I think I prefer it. Very close call though.

I'm in love with B&W and here it certainly reflects the glory times here. However, even colour version appears as film quality of that time. So, I prefer colour version. It is beautiful, very good image

[Manfred M]

Colour is far stronger here as it reflects the aging process of the place. That is 100% lost in the B&W. The crop is very tight at the bottom of the image and that give it a strange and cramped feeling, which is out of character of the rest of the image.

[DanK]

This is a strong image.

Prints may have been B&W in that era (although depending on when it was, there may well have been color), but people walking by saw it in color.

B&W works best when color isn't a major contributor to the image and when the core of the image is contrast, lines, textures, and patterns. That's not true here. Color is a very big part of what makes the image interesting. So my vote goes to color.

As Manfred pointed out, the two are cropped differently. The crop of the color is much better, IMHO. Even the color version would benefit from including a little more at the bottom, if you have more.