Why February Is Always Black and White

October 14, 2026 · by Roy Edlund

Here’s a little inside info about my calendars: if I had my way, every photo in them would be black and white.

This shot didn’t make the 2027 cut and the reason was simple math, I already had two monochromes in the lineup, and I make these to appeal to everyone, not just me.

I know not everyone feels the way I do about black and white, and that’s fair.

So I ration myself. Two, maybe three in a year.

This would have been the third, and third was one too many.

But let me tell you why there’s always at least a couple.

When I was eight or nine years old, I was flipping through a Reader’s Digest and came across a little list of famous people born in February, my birthday month.

And there on it, sharing my birthday was a photographer named Ansel Adams.

I had no idea who he was. But something about the shared birthday stuck, so after the mid-winter break I went to the school library and hunted down photography books and I found one of his.

I spent the next few weeks completely lost in them.

I was a just a kid and I remember thinking, very seriously, that maybe I’d make pictures someday too.

It took a while. But when I finally picked up a camera for real, I looked for the contrast, the light, I don't know, I just felt it, somewhere under my ribs, the way I did when I was eight.

It’s still the first way I see a scene, before I let the color talk me out of it.

So every February in my calendar is black and white.

It always has been, and now you know both reasons, it’s my birthday month, and it’s a quiet thank-you to the man who handed an eight-year-old the whole idea without ever knowing he did.

This one won’t hang on anybody’s February. But in a way it’s the truest photo in the whole pile, because it’s the kind I’d make if I only ever made them for me.

Love from here ❤️

Prints of the photos in this post are available in the Beach Bum Gallery on paper, canvas and metal.