The secrets to great black-and-white photography

If you've never tried black-and-white photography before, I recommend it as a great way to broaden your creativity.

We are used to seeing things in colour, so black and white photography lets us see things differently, perhaps seeing aspects of things around us that we've never appreciated before.

These are the things to be conscious of when shooting in black and white:

• Shapes and textures
• Tonal variation
• Contrast
• Grain/digital noise
• Composition
• Patterns
• Emotional impact
• Nostalgia
• Minimalism
• Shooting in RAW

Practice shooting in black-and-white until you can visualise subjects in black and white before you photograph them.

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Transcript

>> Graham: 0:08

Foreign. Hello again. In this podcast, I'm going to be talking about black and white photography, which I think is one of the, I like it. It's one of the most interesting forms of photography, partly because it makes you look at things a little bit differently and secondly because it's a great way to improve your technical ability in photography. So I'll talk through that, but before I do, just remember to subscribe. Not many people do. So please stand out from the crowd like, and subscribe, to the podcast if you find it useful. Okay. So, what's the big thing about black and white? Well, obviously we see things in color and therefore when we shoot things in color, we kind of see what we're expecting to see. Now, you can obviously manipulate color. certainly with digital photography and post processing, you can saturate, you can desaturate, but switching to black and white changes the whole emphasis of your photography. You're now not looking at things the way that you're used to looking at them. You're looking at them in a different way, obviously without the color, which means that you're looking more at shapes and textures. And that's the fundamental difference between color and black and white photography. But in doing that, it also makes you look at your subject in a different way. So I'm going to run through a few things to think about. the key thing, first of all is that you are really much more reliant on your use of light and shadow when you switch to black and white. So this is where you're looking at strong contrast. You might want a very hard, contrasty shot. And remember all the time you're doing this, this impacts mood. So if you're into, experimenting with mood in your photographs, black and white is a great way to do it. So the place to start is with contrast between light and dark areas, directional lighting, and looking at, very high key or low key aspects of your lighting. So either very bright or very dark aspects of the lighting, because that will have a big impact on the contrast and just what sort of effects you get in the end. So one thing that I have spoken about in the portrait podcast, in fact in the e book that you can, get from the website about portrait photography is that one thing that black and white does, it will tend to bring out the imperfections in somebody's skin. So you do need to be a little bit careful because you can end up with results that are, not terribly flattering. But this again is just one aspect of black and white. So it's something to be aware of. And once you're aware of it, you can either eliminate the effects of bringing out those aspects of a photograph or work with them, make them the focus of the photograph, make them a key part of it. you really need to be focused on composition. So composition really is about how you take the viewer, on a journey through the photograph is one way of looking at it. another aspect of composition is you're provoking the viewer to come up with some kind of a story about what they're looking at. So if you've been on my course, if you've, been in on some of my webinars or workshops, I talk a lot about how we use composition to create space. And when you create space in an image, you create the foundation, you create the room for a story to develop. And the important thing to remember with photography is that when somebody looks at your photograph, they will make up the story, they'll fill in the gaps. So composition, as always, is, is really important in, black and white photography, as it is with everything else. So remember to use things like rule of thirds. If you are not sure about how to experiment with composition, start there and build from there. Texture is a really important aspect of black and white photography because it really comes out. So I've spoken about the texture in somebody's skin. So, you know, we all have little imperfections in our skin. they can come out and slap you in the face if you're not careful in how you shoot your black and white photographs, but equally with any other subject. So if you're photographing buildings, you might have a very smooth, surface, a very smooth, covering on the building. Or it could be very rocky. It could be, sandstone, something like that, where there's lots and lots of texture. And again, I've already mentioned how you use lighting, but lighting can be used to really emphasize texture or flatten it out, eliminate it. So this is another area where you can start to experiment and get very different results just by changing your lighting. So think about the kind of textures you're going to see in things like stone, in wood, in fabric, obviously skin. And think about your lighting. Whether it's side lighting, backlighting, or it might be full on frontal lighting, all of those will have a big impact on how that texture comes across in the image. So think rough, smooth, weathered, all these different things. And remember, when you're putting texture in, it helps to tell the story of whatever that object is. If it's something new, if there's very little texture. If it's very smooth, the. That can create one sense of the image and the subject equally if it's very rough. And here I'm actually thinking about, some pictures that I have shared on workshops, and that is of an elephant. So shooting an elephant in black and white or getting a black and white image of an elephant, is very different to what you'll get with a color image. And the fundamental difference between the two is you're now looking at the texture. And if you can imagine looking at the hide of an elephant and how wrinkled it is. And also it tends to be out the hairs that you'll get around the lip, around the eyes. So there's all these little elements that are aspects of this animal that they're still there, obviously in color, but because we're so used to seeing things in color, they get overlooked. They just kind of blend into the overall image. And you look at it and that's an elephant, and that might be as far as you go. Whereas if you go to a black and white image, suddenly you're seeing different things. So if you don't believe me, just try it. You don't have to go off and find an elephant. just find another subject or even shoot a friend, maybe a good friend, and just take what you feel is a good photograph of them in black, sorry, in color, and then convert it to black and white. So shoot digitally. Obviously it's much easier to do it that way and then just pop it through a post processor and take the color out. And, the next thing to come onto really is filters. So I tend to use digital filters. you might want to put a filter on the end of your lens. However you shoot, that's fine. But different color filters, so I particularly like red, but what they will do is highlight different areas and you'll get different contrasts, different tones. So again, this is one of the areas where black and white gives you a lot of opportunity to experiment and to play, with your photography by changing the filters. So do find it. Hopefully you've got a package that allows you to apply digital filters. I tend to use Photoshop mostly because I've used it for a long time and I know how to use it and I, you know, I'm happy with that. But there are some great filters in Photoshop and I'm sure there are other, you know, a lot of other, post processing software packages will give you options there. But don't be afraid to experiment with it. That's really important. Okay. The next thing to really talk about from there is tonal range. And what I mean by that is really the range of grays that you have. So the tonal range is the difference between the darkest part of the photograph. And the brightest part of the photograph. And how you light the photograph in the first place when you shoot, it will determine what your tonal range is likely to be. So if you are shooting something on a bright day with a fairly. Let's say it's a cloudy day, so there's a reasonable amount of light, but it's fairly soft light, you're likely to have a fairly, small tonal range. So the difference between the darkest part and the lightest part of the photograph is not likely to be very much. It'll be quite subtle. Whereas if you compare that to a bright, sunny day outside. Where you've got very, very bright sunshine. And then in the shadows, very dark shadows, you've got a much greater tonal range. So, again, what's right for your photograph. And I know that's your call, but this is another thing to think about. And obviously this is a factor when you're shooting in color. But because we're so focused on the variation in tone when it comes to black and white. So obviously in color, you're tending to look at the variation in color. Is it vivid, is it washed out? all that kind of thing. but in black and white, you don't have that. So you're really looking at the, difference in the tonal range. In the difference between the different shades of gray that you have available. And again, this will have a big impact on the mood of the image. So here you can use the tonal range to create something that's maybe quite soft. fairly easy going, you know, a nice kind of comfortable image. Or you could go for something perhaps a bit more contrasty. And that might create a completely different mood to the image. And mood is really important because where we really connect with a photograph is emotionally. So if you think of any photograph that's had a big impact on you, something that maybe you would like to create yourself, the chances are, the reason you feel that way about it. Is that you had quite a strong emotional reaction to that image. And they are certainly the images that we tend to look back on. If you think of historical events, they tend to be photographs or photographs that, elicit a strong emotional reaction. They tend to be the more classic photographs. Now, it could be something dramatic. Doesn't have to be you can shoot really good portraits, but. But often where you get that emotional response is in eye contact. So if you've got a very strong eye contact in a portrait, for example, that can give you a much greater impact than something where there's no eye contact, where somebody's looking out of, say, one side of the frame. So be very aware of tonal, range. Now, shapes and patterns, it's another thing that will tend to come out. So once again, when you shoot in color, color can be very distracting. So by taking that away suddenly there can be all sorts of shapes and patterns that you can build into, the composition of the photograph. So for example, if you are, doing some street photography and you've got one of those pavements with these sort of smaller squared or rectangular paving stones, so you get a kind of herringbone pattern in the paving. You can make use of that. You might want to change your composition to maybe. That herringbone pattern takes up the bottom third of the image. Because in black and white that will really stand out. Whereas in color you might lose it because it might have a nice soft, say, brown tone. There might be other things around and it can kind of disappear a little bit. Whereas when you switch to black and white, suddenly it's right in your face. So you've got that pattern. And that can be a very strong element of the photograph. You can use it to create leading lines and also to create depth in the image. And that can take the viewer's eye towards your subject if you think about how you're going to use it in composition. And you can always, set yourself a challenge. If you want to practice this stuff. Just set yourself a challenge where you go out and you spend an hour walking around looking for patterns and shooting those. And it's really good to do that in an environment that you're familiar with because it makes you look at what's really there. And, the thing I find, when we're in an environment that we're very familiar with, there's the old phrase familiarity breeds contempt. We tend not to look. We sort of see things, you know, we navigate. We don't walk into things, but we miss the details because we're so used to walking past them. We don't. It's almost like, we just fill that spot in our brain with a kind of pre, created image. The kind of thing I mean by that, if you're into drawing, A great trick if you're trying to copy a photograph, for example, of somebody, is to turn the photograph Upside down and then draw it and the reason why. And if you haven't tried this before, just as a side thing, give it a go. Particularly if you don't think you're very good at drawing. And the reason that most people draw really badly. Like you're trying to draw a picture of somebody and it looks like a child has drawn it. And a lot of us get that. And the reason that happens is that we're drawing a face and we know what a face contains. Its eyes, its nose, its mouth. So when it comes to drawing somebody's eye, for example, we don't draw the lines that are there. We just draw an eye. We draw what is in our mind as an eye. That's why these things look so terrible. And if you flip an image upside down and copy it, suddenly we're just copying the lines and the spaces that are there. So this is exactly. So do try that. Actually that's homework. but do try that. It's a way of just getting. It sort of tricks the brain into actually looking at what's really there instead of just looking at images, ah, that we haven't in our kind of little memory library of what different shapes look like, what different things look like. It makes us look again. So look for shapes, look for patterns and look at how you can use them. Shoot things in different ways. portrait, landscape, get up high, get low. All those kind of things that you can do when you're experimenting with your photography. But black and white is a great way of starting to see those things anew with the emotional side of things. I find that black and white does create that feeling of nostalgia. And I'm m guessing that obviously when photography started most of it was in black and white. There were some experiments with different techniques of creating color. Some were more successful than others. But for, if you start look, if you, let's say you're into family history, you don't have to go back very far to find that the only photographs you've got of people, if you can find any photographs at all, they're in black and white. Or if we're looking at historical events, photographs will tend to be in black and white for a good deal of them. Until really Second World War you get some color photographs. Color film wasn't widely used but it was used. but it's really after the Second World War you start to see a, a bigger take up of color, images or you see more, more color images simply because the the techniques of doing it, the Chemicals required to do it. Got it. They basically nailed it. And then color photography became more affordable for people. So obviously it got taken up. And these days we see everything in startling color sometimes and video and all the rest of it. But black and white can create that, that feeling, nostalgia. And I've got photographs taken. There's a photograph I took in Tanzania of a couple of cheetahs on a termite. Ah, man. Just looking around. And I loved, I just flipped it into black and white. And I just love that shot because it's just two cheetahs, a termite mound and the Serengeti. So it's savannah, it's long grass, and it could have been shot, that picture could have been shot yesterday or it could have been shot 150 years ago. So you just don't know. But that's one aspect of it that, that I really love. When you start applying it to, modern scenes, that actually brings me on to another thing. And it's something that you might well have heard me talk about before, which is just to shoot raw. So I do tend to bang on about that. But really it's because I think if you do that, you give yourself, much, much greater options in how you work with an image once you've captured it. And when it comes to capturing an image, it depends on what you're shooting for. What I do with wildlife, often I have to do it really quickly. I don't get a second chance. So, things like composition might be off a little bit. you know, if it's a humpback, well, my horizon might not be quite straight or whatever it might be. So post processing is an important aspect of what I do to just kind of correct things and get the composition right. So if I'm using a zoom lens, I'll tend to zoom back a little bit so that what I've got in frame is a little bit wider than what I'm going to use in the final image. So I can crop in to the image a little bit, still have the kind of effect I'm going for. Normally I like to have, the animal because I mostly shoot wildlife. But I like to have the animal fairly large in the frame. But by shooting a little bit wider, it gives me some options on composition. If I've got space around the animal that I can, just experiment with, I might change the, format of the image. I might have shot it in landscape and I might choose to flip portrait. or I can do other things. I can work with different ways of just setting that shot up. So shoot wide, use raw, because that will give you access to all of the data that that camera is, that the camera you've used is capable of recording. And then you've got a lot of flexibility when it comes to post processing, Whether it's, rearranging the composition, it might be working with the filters. I've spoken about, changing contrast, all the things that we do in composition, shooting raw. And you've got a lot of, a lot of opportunities to do something really special. If you shoot in jpeg. Yeah, you can. Your camera's likely to shoot faster if you're really pushing it. yes, you can get more images on your memory card. But once you've got the image, you may well find that you can't do very much with it, you can't blow it up very much, all that kind of thing. And I think it's, a real shame if you get a really great shot, but you've captured it in a format that doesn't give you much in the way of options to do anything with it or might limit just how big you can make it if it's one of those images you really want to blow up and put on a wall somewhere. So one of the things that will also happen really through practice is to be able to see something and see it in black and white, see it in monochrome. so obviously we see in color. And when you switch from color to black and m white, particularly when you first do it, there can be quite a big difference. what you get might be really unexpected because you're just not used to seeing things as shapes and textures and looking at the tonal variation, the grayscale variation, rather than what's going on with the interaction of different colors and how they impact what part of the image your eye is drawn to when you look at it. So if you've not tried black and white before, I really recommend you go out and just shoot some, images in black and white. I shoot them in color on the camera. Don't worry about that because I might have something that I really like in color. But once you get into post processing, get rid of the color and then start working with those aspects I've already spoken about, because you'll start to see that there are, there are big differences in an image shot in color. And, so the original color version and then going on to black and white. And I remember seeing. So I was in Sydney doing a photo walk and I just saw row Bicycles and, And I knew exactly what I wanted because I could just see that if I flip that to black and white, I could get a really contrasty, black and white image. And I, to my mind, quite a striking image. Something that would really draw the viewer. But you only get that ability, I guess, to see things, that are in color, through your color eyes or color seeing eyes and see and recognizing what effect you might get in black and white. So it's definitely one of those things I absolutely recommend that you just try out. I've, given you some ideas already, I hope, and, that will, that will, I think as well. It gives you just more options. It's more things you can choose from when it comes to creating really interesting images and maybe developing your style. And you might even find that for a while at least, you just want to shoot only black and white or only very, very low color, very, very desaturated images. And all of these things, to my mind, are part of the joy of doing photography because we get to experiment and I'm quite impatient. but the great thing about digital photography is you can just play around with an image straight away and see the results straight away and then try something different. So it's a great way of just developing your eye and the way you view different subjects and how you choose to represent them. there are other things you can do. You can use minimalism, if you're into that. Black and white is really good for that composition, has a big part to play in that too. So you can have, a subject which occupies quite a small part of the frame, and the rest of it is empty. So it could be completely black, could be completely white. But if you, again, just want to try different styles, minimalism, I think is a great one to play with again because it gets you to really think about what you're doing with your subject. And then it can, you can create quite emotionally impactful images just by eliminating a lot of, a lot of the other stuff that might normally be in the frame. So other elements in the frame might be quite distracting from the subject. And it's, again, another thing to think about. It's why I talk about the Visual Storyteller. I've done two or three podcasts on the Visual Storyteller. But the idea behind that is that it makes you look in the viewfinder. It makes you look at the screen on the back of your camera. If you're doing it that way and looking at every element in that image before you press the Shutter button. So is that image, does it have everything you want in it and are there no distractions in it? And one of the reasons for doing this is simply that it gets away from that old chestnut of taking a portrait of somebody. And then when you look at it afterwards, you realize there's a tree growing out of the head or a lamppost, or there's a couple of dogs in the background that are, you know, making up from having a big fight. Might be having a big fight. But all of these things, while it can be kind of funny, they can also be quite frustrating. And the reason that these things creep into photographs, if we get, is we get distracted on our subject and it's all we look at. So thinking about what's in the whole frame, thinking story is a great way of eliminating those kind of things happening. Or if they are there, build them in, make them part of the story. So there's no rights and wrongs about this. But it's. Once you're doing it, you decide what the story is that you're shooting. The story that somebody else sees might be very different. And this is again, another part about another aspect of photography that I love. but it is something to think about. So that really covers what I wanted to talk about, in this podcast about black and white photography. As I say, if you haven't done it before, really give it a go. So what are the things to remember? Well, first of all, you are very conscious of shapes and textures. You need to work, very much with your lighting and be conscious of the tonal variation you've got in the picture, whether it's quite small. That example I gave of shooting outside on an overcast day where you've got even soft lighting, or it might be quite a harsh contrast. So that might be on a bright, sunny day. Or if you're using studio lighting, how you compose your frame? Where is your subject? What's going on around them? Is there anything around them? Are you really isolating them? What's the emotional impact of that? always shoot raw, I would say that. And, then experiment, experiment with filters in post processing and just anything else that occurs. You know, the whole point about doing this is that as you try one thing, it might inspire you with an idea to do something else. And then finally, it's always a good idea to grab ideas from other people. It's what we do. So you could always do, go into somewhere like Instagram, just do a search on black and white or variations of hashtag blackand white and that will bring up those kind of images. And you might find some photographers whose work you like and have a look at them. But that is another good way of just getting ideas and getting inspiration. Okay, so that's it from me on this one. I hope you found that useful. I hope you felt a bit inspired. Please like and subscribe. Makes me feel less lonely when I'm doing these. And, that's it for this podcast and I will speak to you next time. So enjoy your photography. Bye for now. Well, I hope you enjoyed that. Now, I just want to say thank you for tuning in and joining me in the, Wildlife and Adventure Photography podcast. If you have enjoyed today's episode, please give me a Like a subscribe, maybe tell your friends, and by all means leave a comment. And if there is a subject you would like me to cover in the future, please let me know and I'll, be very happy to do my best. So thanks again for, joining me and I look forward to seeing you again. Next podcast. Bye for now.