See in Black and White

Black and white photography requires a different mindset to color. You need to look at the world in a different way. You need to try and picture the world with the color removed. Look for highlights and shadows, bright areas and dark ones, try to see how the shapes and forms in front of you will translate into shades of monochromatic grey. This requires a big mental shift, but once you are used to making the translation, you will notice the difference in your pictures. The difficulty lies in guessing how light or dark an object will appear when converted to black and white, and one way of getting around it is to squint as you look at the scene. This will give you a fair idea of how bright or dark certain areas are. Similarly, some people elect to take a spot reading from various parts of the scene, which gives a more accurate measure of the luminance of specific areas. Ultimately, though, with enough practice and a little patience, you will get used to just "reading" how the world in front of you will appear in black and white without any mechanical aids or visual trickery.

Think in terms of composition

When you strip the color out of a scene, all you are left with is the base elements that make up the composition. This makes it much more important to think seriously about your composition and to get it just right. This is one of the main reasons why working in black and white is such an important step in the development of any photographer, because the lessons learned in composition will ultimately make you a better photographer, no matter whether you work with color or without.

Shape, form and texture

The rough stubble of an man's beard, the bark of a tree, the strange allure of peeling paint, just some of the subjects that make for good black and white photographs. Textures and shapes, abstracts and close-ups, all of these are very challenging subjects, but if you can pull off a picture where the composition is more important than the subject matter, you will know you have arrived as a photographer. To bring out the shape and texture of an object, you will, in most cases, have to spend hours and hours looking at the direction of the light and doing whatever is in your power to manipulate it to fall on the subject in just the right way.

Don't just photograph old things

A common trap many photographers fall in to when starting out in Black and White photography is that they shoot only 'historic' subjects, such as old buildings or restored cars. This is certainly one good approach, but another is to photograph ultra-modern subjects, such as traffic and skyscrapers, which will have a funky post-modern feel.

Black and White portraits

Portraits are a favorite subject of black and white photographers, and for good reason too. The stark reality presented by this type of photography seems to show the person as they really are. It seems to lay bare their soul and expose all their traits and flaws. In a sense, looking at a black and white picture of a person is more like looking at a photograph of his personality, rather than of his features. But whether you are photographing the old or the young, getting in close can be well worth your while. I often fill the frame to bursting point, in what is described in the cinematic tradition as an extreme close-up, often losing the top of the head and the ears, focusing on only the facial features.

Shoot landscapes in black and white

Another subject that lends itself to the charms of black and white photography is the great outdoors. Overall, the ideas behind capturing good landscapes in black and white are remarkably similar to capturing it in color. The first thing you will need is a lot of patience, waiting, often for hours, till the sun reaches the exact point in the sky from where it will light the landscape in exactly the way you want it to. And as with color, your most valuable tool when setting out to photograph the glory of nature will invariably be a tripod. This will allow you to use longer shutter speeds, especially at the end of the day when the sun casts marvelously long shadows over the fields and valleys and allow you to use greater depth of field. It will also force you to think about the shot a little bit more before you set up to take the picture.

Black and white is great for abstracts

Black and white photography is one step further removed from reality than color photography. That makes it the perfect medium for abstract photography. There is also the added bonus that your pictures will feel a little more 'arty'.

Convert your pictures to black and white the smart way

There is a right way and a wrong way to convert the images. The 'wrong' way, or perhaps the easy way, is use the desaturate function (click on "image", "adjustments" and "desaturate" in Photoshop). This simply discards all color information. The better way, which gives you a lot more control over exactly how certain colors are converted into black and white is to use the Channel Mixer. Click on "image" "adjustments" and "channel mixer". Then make sure the "Monochrome" checkbox is selected. Now, by moving the "Red", "Green" and ""Blue" sliders about, you will be able to adjust the individual brightnesses of specific colors. Very subtle changes in how you choose to convert the colors will lead to strikingly different effects. As always, the proof of the picture is in the seeing, and the examples below amply demonstrates the power of this technique.

Don't let your printer let you down

Many older printers are built to print high quality images in color and to print rough quality text in black and white. For this reason, they will deliver higher quality images when set-up for color printing than for black and white. The answer, then, is to print in full color mode, but if you do so, you run the risk of obtaining a final image with a color cast, or a slight background tint. This is easily corrected, however, by adjusting the printer's color balance, which is usually manipulated through a range of sliders controlling Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow output, located in the printer settings menu.

Combine the old and the new

An alternative method of obtaining a high quality photograph is to print the traditional way, with open plate chemicals in a black and white darkroom. To do this, you will need a computer printer that can print on clear acetate. You will then print a tonally inverted image on the acetate, and use it as a negative to print a positive in the darkroom as you would when shooting on film. This gets around all the problems of archival quality, whilst still allowing you the creative freedom offered by manipulating the image on the computer.