THE ROUGH STUBBLE OF AN OLD 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 of a picture where the composition is more important than the subject matter, you will know you have arrived as a photographer.

But photographing textures can be disappointing as often as not, for the plain and simple reason that most photographers are just in too much of a hurry to get the lighting right.

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 get manipulate it to fall on the subject in just the right way.

Amongst the masters of photography, one of the greatest and most recognized is Edward Weston, and even he, when he wanted to photograph a bog standard pepper, took enough pains and thirty different exposures before he was satisfied with the result (see image above right). And remember, this shot was taken in the days before digital photography, and even before 35mm cameras, so he would taken time to think about every single shot, each time moving the light ever so slightly, each time rotating the pepper just a tad.

But the reward? An image that has become synonymous with exceptional photography.

The key to good lighting for shapes and textures, is to keep it as simple as possible. Start with one light, and move it until you get the most pleasing collection of highlights and shadows possible. For maximum effect you will want to have nice and deep shadows while maintaining bright highlights. This will often mean you need the light low down, or rather shining from a very steep angle across your subject. Once you have attained the overall effect you want, you can then add some touches with reflectors or softened second lights.

Converting photographs to black and white

In the old days, to do black and white photography, you needed not only the will, the skill and the camera, you also needed some black and white film and a darkroom to process it in.

Nowadays, that has all changed. In fact, many digital cameras have a black and white function built in, meaning that the image is converted to monochrome right in the camera. For the best results, however, you will be well advise to shoot your images in color and then convert then to black and white on the computer.

But even in Photoshop, 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’). 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 brightness 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 above amply demonstrates the power of this technique.

This is a much more powerful tool, and can be likened to the effects of colored filters used in traditional black and white photography. You can for instance darken a blue sky to highlight the white clouds that would otherwise not be visible, same as you would by using a red or yellow filter if you were shooting on black and white film.

If, however, you have taken the picture in black and white mode in the camera, all the color information will already be lost, and you will not be able to convert the image the same way, so you are severely limiting your options.