How To Think In Black & White

How To Think In Black & White

by William Lulow

In the days of photographers like Ansel Adams, America’s premier landscape photographer of the 1940s and 1950s, black & white film was the norm. The first really viable and commercial color film was introduced by Kodak around 1936. Then, when Kodachrome was unveiled, photographers for National Geographic magazine began using it to document the world. This, of course, led to its wide-spread use. But color film was much more difficult to process. It needed precise development times and even more precise chemical temperatures. So its processing was usually left to professional labs whose job it was to maintain all the steps in the process to the correct specs. So, photographers themselves, tended to do all their experimentation and personal work in black & white.

Today, color images are really the norm. Black & White pictures are considered somewhat more “artistic.”

I like to shoot landscapes in black & white because they reveal a bit more. This can seem to be a contradiction, but sometimes we are dazzled by color and it can blind us to the richness of detail. Black & white, on the other hand, tends to rely more on composition and subtleties of light and shade. Some scenes just cry out to be shot in black & white. Others need color.

When shooting landscapes, as in most aspects of photography, it becomes necessary to decide what kind of image you wish to make. Do you want to increase the contrast or lessen it? Which method will say what you want about the landscape? I like to put my camera in “monochrome” mode to shoot original scenes in Black & White rather than convert them later. Because of my long background in shooting original black & white film, I tend to see landscapes in shades of gray. So, I often filter my exposures the way I did when I was shooting film.

One thing to keep in mind is that when you shoot in black & white, filters will lighten (or increase contrast) colors similar to their own. In other words, if you wish to lighten trees, use a green filter. Conversely, a red filter will lighten red things and darken blue things. So, if you wish to add contrast to a blue sky when shooting in monochrome, use a red filter. One tip that I found helpful was to study a color wheel. This will give you a sense of which colors are opposites and which are similarities.

Note the sky in the above image. There is great separation between the puffy, white clouds and the black sky. This images was made with a red filter over the lens.     

These days, whenever I’m shooting a landscape, I use a gradient neutral density filter. Here is what it looks like:

The top part of the filter is a neutral density (one that lets all colors pass) and the bottom is clear. What this does is darkens and adds contrast to the sky but not the lower parts of the scene. Here is an image shot with this filter:

In this shot, I wanted to have the sky dark, but still retain a light enough image to see detail in the foreground (lower part of the image).

Here’s another example of what a red filter can do in monochrome mode:

You can see the richness of the blue sky here which is represented as black with the clouds and the lower portion of the shot has plenty of detail.

Here is the same image in color mode:

Which do you think has more impact? Not only do you have to be able to think about composition and exposure, you also need to be thinking of how the image would reproduce in black&white or color modes.

Also, another little hint I can give you to get better images in black & white is to increase the contrast sliders a bit if you are changing modes from color to monochrome. The dropping of the color information almost always leaves the image a bit pale-looking.

So, the thinking in black & white comes in when you are making these decisions. How much contrast will you need? What parts of the image need to be shown? How deep can the shadows be? Your images will improve the more thought you give to these questions.