Black & White Photography is Dead
With advances in digital photography, taking black and white photos in black and white has become increasingly unpopular. Let’s revive the art.
Most photographers practicing the art of black and white photography will recommend that you shoot in color first, and process the images to monochrome because it gives you more options. And while this is sound advice, it could also cause you to miss out on the huge opportunity that digital black and white photography affords us.
In the age of black and white film, contrast, grain and how colors translate to shades of gray was governed by filters, film emulsions, development times and printing papers. The time between conceiving your vision and realizing it could be hours, days or even weeks. But with a MILC or DSLR set to monochrome mode you can realize that vision as you compose your images or immediately after you capture them. And then you can process the Raw versions of those same images to match that vision and improve on it.
Stop Shooting Black and White in color. Start shooting Black and White in BLACK AND WHITE.
In monochrome mode, you can control overall contrast, highlight and shadow contrast, sharpness, grain, vignetting, apply red, orange, yellow and green filters, and add monotone effects including sepia and cyanotype. By learning these features you have it in your power to make amazing black and white JPEGs right in your camera. And you can use them right away to post to social media, and also as a reference when doing your conversions.
Commercial photographers using view cameras would swap the film back for a Polaroid back to capture a “proof of concept” before exposing the actual film. The LCD on your DSLR/MILC works in a similar way to help you visualize the potential of your image, and this is especially important in black and white photography since as human beings we can’t just turn off the color in our vision.
Most digital cameras have a “monochrome” mode, which includes red, orange, yellow, and green digital filters, and monotone options such as sepia and cyanotype. It’s part of Canon’s “picture styles“, and Nikon’s “picture control”. I’ve had great success creating black and white “presets” and storing them in one of my User settings so I can switch back and forth quickly between color and monochrome mode. I can boost the sharpness and contrast, control grain via “Noise Reduction”, apply filters if I forget to bring them along, and use ADL (DLO on the Canon) to recover highlight and shadow detail. I always shoot in both JPEG and Raw so that I can use the monochrome image as a reference. Or just share it if I don’t have time to process it right away. I always strive to get the best possible black and white JPEGs out of my camera. That way, I know I’ll have a great starting point for Raw processing.
Next time you’re shooting and thinking in black and white, give it a try.
