More About How To Think In Black&White

More About How To Think In Black&White

by William Lulow

In the days of view cameras and people like famed landscape photographer, Ansel Adams, Black&White was really the norm for making beautiful images of places. One of the reasons was, in those days, color film was relatively new. It was introduced around 1936 for public use, but it was difficult to process and one often had to send it out to Kodak or to a processing lab and wait to get the pictures back, usually in the mail.

Black&White, on the other hand, was fairly easy to process. Hobbyists and professionals alike had darkrooms in which they could develop film and make prints at will. The quality of your images was always dependent on how skilled you were with chemicals, the development process as a whole and, of course, making prints. I got very good at it. So much so that I got jobs at a few photographers’ studios where I was in charge of the darkrooms, both for film processing and for print making. In one studio, we often processed black&white roll film (usually the 120 size) 18 rolls at a time. We could also process around 60  to 100 or so 4×5 sheet films or the equivalent in 8×10 sheet film. So, I knew how to handle really large quantities of film and process all of it to fairly exacting specifications. My printing skills were often in high demand back in those days as well.

Today, with the advent of digital imagery (I began to shoot everything digitally in 2001), color mode has become the norm. So, if you are a real photographic artist like Adams was or like so many photographers were from the 1940s through the 2000s, and you were really impressed by large, black&white prints, you had to begin to think about it for a while because the standard setup of many digital cameras defaulted to one of a few color modes, or picture styles. You could convert the image to black&white using software packages, but they often didn’t yield quite the same quality as if they were shot in original monochrome mode. So, you had to physically take the camera off of its color setting and switch to MONOCHROME.

This should have made photographers think more about which images were more impactful in black&white than in color. Sometimes it didn’t. So, here are some points to think about if you are contemplating shooting a scene in original black&white:

1. Does the scene have some intrinsic contrast?

If there are elements like some clear blue sky and some clouds, you can usually make a really interesting image in black&white. Here is an example:

This is an original shot in color. It has some interesting contrast between the sky and the land, plus it also has a reflection, which I will talk about in a moment. It is also not super colorful. The colors are subdued and it almost looks to be monochrome the way it is. Here is a computerized black&White version:

This conversion almost appears sharper and more defined than the color one, which is kind of muted because there are no vibrant colors. So a scene like this renders much better and more impactful in black&white.

Here is one that I actually saw in black&white for some of the very same reasons:

This image was produced in the camera with a #25 (red) filter over the lens to heighten the effect of the deep blue sky. There is much more color information than in the previous example, but I wanted actually to minimize it. Anything in a bright color will jump out at the viewer, whereas if it is shot in original black&white, it tends to fade into the scene itself. So here, we have the boats, the puffy white cloud and the dark black sky making for a dramatic image. Here is the same scene in color. You decide which is more impactful. They were shot separately, the black&white is not a conversion:

Here, the two people in red as well as the flags on the ship as well as the greenish color of the water all detract from the impact of the shot. They take away from the focus that should be on the ships themselves. Some of these things can be eliminated in post-production, which would have made the shot in color stronger, but I saw this scene in original black&white. I just shot the color image to have a comparison.

          2. Does the scene have some intrinsic interest? Are there other elements that give the scene some basic eye appeal?

I have used this image recently to describe something else, but the feeling evoked here looks much better in black&white than in color. It’s a somber scene with storm clouds and a rough sea. It has closed umbrellas (not colorful) and empty lounge chairs. The whole feeling cried out to be shot in black&white. I dodged and burned the clouds as well as the foreground to give it some more contrast. It was also shot with my gradient neutral density filter pack to increase the contrast in the sky while leaving the foreground lighter with more detail. The feeling is what gives this image its interest as well as the sky treatment.

          3. Does the scene have many bright colors?

Normally, if there are many bright colors in the scene, it then just about cries out to be photographed in color, because you would have to be thinking about showing them. Here’s a scene that was such a scene:

This would have not worked in black&white because the whole concept of this image is to show the colors. You can do flowers and other colorful things in black&white, if you only want to show an unusual shape or composition:

Here are some aspen trees shot up near Boulder, Colorado but during the summer time, so they hadn’t yet turned to their fall, yellow colors. The side light on them also just cried out to be shot in black&white, because there were no really bright colors here.

I have presented three things to look for when thinking about whether or not to shoot in original black&white. Hopefully, you will begin to train your eye to look for light conditions you know will reproduce better in monochrome.