Black and White Photography Tips
Shooting great black and white images starts before you press the shutter. It isn’t a case of just converting any random image into black and white in your chosen editing software and hoping for the best. Usually great monochrome shots come with a bit of pre-planning and a trained eye to know what works. Here we look at black and white photography tips, to help you hone the art of photography in monochrome.
Choosing the right subjects and lighting conditions is essential, as with any image creation; but you have different considerations for creating an awesome black and white image than you do for an image in colour.
There is an exception to shooting in Colour and it’s when you are shooting in RAW and switching to Black and White mode. There you can see your results on the LCD in black and white, but the camera actually records all of the information, including the colour – the best of both worlds. However if you’re shooting in JPEG, shoot in colour and do the conversion in post-process later.
ISO
You also want to shoot with the lowest possible ISO possible. While this is something that most of us do when shooting in colour, it is particularly important when it comes to monochrome. Noise created by ISO can become even more obvious when shooting black and white. If you’re after this noise you can always add it later in post process if you wish, but it’s harder take noise out if you retrospectively don’t want it.
See the shot
To visualise in black and white, look only at shadows and highlights, texture and patterns, lines and shapes and contrast. This is a great way to visualise a black and white image even though we live in a colour world, by learning to see past the colour. Scenes with strong contrasts add interest to the image. Pay particular attention to shadows and highlights, which will become a feature of your shot.
One of the most difficult things when shooting in black and white is understanding how the colours in the scene will translate into different shades of grey in your final image. This is something you can work on, either through experience of creating and converting colour images into monochrome images or by turning the colour off of your television so you can see how colours in differing scenarios relate into black and white. It may sound a bit extreme, but it can help massively with your vision when selecting a scene that will work. In black and white photography the colour detail is lost meaning that the image can appear flatter and less interesting without the strong visual back up of colour. Scenes that rely on strong colour contrasts such as a field full of red poppies don’t work well in black and white.
One of the essential elements for adding impact to your images is the contrast between light and shade. In black and white images it’s often the darkest elements in the image that draw your attention. Subtle textures and tones can help to add interest. Strong side lighting, on a bright day will help enhance the texture in the scene, while a softer diffused light, like when it’s cloudy, is best for capturing subtle tones.
Patterns are interesting because of their ordered repetition. Colour often distracts us from giving the pattern our full attention. By using monochrome, images of patterns are far more fascinating. When you start to look for patterns to shoot in black and white, you will start to notice patterns everywhere – it’s like a whole new world just opened up.
The general rules on composition or framing apply just as well to black and white photography as they do when shooting in colour. However without colour as a point of focus, you will need to train yourself to look at shapes, tones, textures, highlights and shadows in your frame as points of interest.
Timing
A lot of photographers like to shoot black and white when it is a dark or overcast day and the contrast is low. However, shooting black and white when it’s bright and sunny creates strong shadows, which produce really striking black and white images, so you don’t want to rule that out either. For a striking abstract shot you might want to have a try at shooting the shadows as the subject for a very surreal black and white image.
Sunrise and sunset generally don’t generally make for the best time to shoot black and white, as part of the appeal of shooting at these times is for the strong colours.
In general, you should try to keep detail in the highlights, in the same way that you would when shooting colour images.
