Black & White Photography: When It Works Best with Rebecca Kowalsky

When should a photo live in color, and when is it stronger in monochrome?

In this episode, I sit down with Rebecca Kowalsky, a Jerusalem-based photographer and YouTuber whose practical teaching style and rapid channel growth have inspired thousands of photographers around the world. We dig into one of the biggest creative decisions every photographer faces: choosing between black and white or color.

Rebecca shares clear, real-world guidance on how to think about contrast, emotion, storytelling and distraction inside the frame. We talk about why committing to a choice matters, why fewer images often tell a stronger story, and how harsh midday light can become your secret weapon instead of something to avoid.

We also explore:

• How removing color can simplify composition
• Why high-contrast scenes are perfect for monochrome
• The danger of posting too many photos
• Building a cohesive photo essay
• Practical ways to train your eye
• Growing a photography YouTube channel from zero
• Finding inspiration at any stage of your journey

If you are trying to level up your photography, make more intentional images, and understand what actually makes a frame powerful, this conversation will give you ideas you can try immediately.

Show Notes:
Rebecca Kowalsky: https://imagesthroughtime.com
Rebecca Kowalsky Instagram
Rebecca Kowalsky YouTube

Welcome to the Big Photo Hunt, arguably the worlds friendliest photography community.

Some more stuff for you:

• The Big Photo Hunt is the world's friendliest photography community.
• Ken Deckinger created a YouTube channel for learnings and tips.
• And of course, the Big Photo Hunt is on Instagram.

Transcript

speaker-0 (00:00.162)
The first thing I say is when you're capturing something and you're looking through the viewfinder, you want to put in as much as you can that has to do with your subject and get rid of as much as possible that's distracting. Obviously, sometimes you can't, something's stationary. So you can say the same thing. Color could be the distraction that you need to get rid of.

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Welcome to the Big Photo Hunt podcast, a show where we talk with aspiring and professional photographers to help us all grow and improve our photography together. I'm your host, Ken Deckinger. If you're one of our community members and you'd like to be a guest on the show, please visit bigphotohunt.com for more information.

speaker-1 (00:58.574)
My guest today is Rebecca Kowalsky. She's a photographer and a YouTuber out of Jerusalem, Israel. And not only is Rebecca just super cool, but it has been super fun to watch her YouTube channel grow from the ground up to, at the time of recording this podcast, 22,000 subscribers. And she deserves it. Her content is helpful and valuable, not to mention enjoyable to watch.

One of the videos that she put out was about black and white photography and the conversation around whether to shoot black and white or color. And if you've listened to this podcast before, then you'll know that I am colorblind. I see colors. I'm what's called red green colorblind. And so what that means is I don't see red or green unless it's really cranked up in the saturation. And so colors like blue and purple can oftentimes look alike to me because purple

It's just blue with some red in it. And so I reached out to Rebecca and I wanted to have her on the podcast to talk about black and white photography and just to get to know her as a fellow photographer. Plus I started a YouTube channel a couple months ago. It's new and my first video actually had like almost 13,000 views which totally shocked me. But then I've got a lot of videos here that are like 50 views, 80 views, 100 and that's just part of the game when you're starting out.

But I tell you this because Rebecca is the person that inspired me to pull the trigger and jump into YouTube. And so for that reason alone, she holds a special place in my heart. And that's on top of the idea that she's just an awesome person and an amazing photographer. So I'm incredibly excited to talk to Rebecca today. We'll talk about her. We're gonna talk about her life, YouTube. And of course, we're gonna talk about black and white photography tips.

And so sit back and relax unless you're walking on the street or driving. Don't sit back and relax if you're driving. I mean, you can relax, but just keep your hands on the wheel and enjoy my conversation today with photographer, Rebecca Kowalski. Hi, Rebecca. Hey, I like that Mediterranean tan you have going on.

speaker-0 (03:12.342)
is purely from running from the early morning. The sun is already so strong.

Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I really appreciate it and was really looking forward to chatting.

Me too. I can talk photography with anyone, especially someone that's like as nice as you. I'm in, as you say.

You don't know me yet, so don't say that.

I'm going to take the risk.

speaker-1 (03:39.822)
Okay, okay. So wait, before we start, are you from Israel or you made Aliyah or what? Did you move there?

From Chicago originally, I made Aliyah in 1985 when we were 25 years old. That's 40 years ago. Now we're 65, my husband and I. We had one child at the time who was a year old. He is now 41. And we have six children and 15 grandchildren. So, wow. Yeah. They keep me busy also.

Yeah. And where are they? Where are they all over?

good question. One lives here where we live in the city. Most are in the Jerusalem area, let's put it that way. And two are in the Tel Aviv area, more in central Israel.

Cool, very cool. So one of the reasons I really wanna talk to you about was because you were talking about black and white versus color photography. And the reason is, is because, and I've mentioned this in my podcast before, is because I'm color blind. And so, yeah, so it's been a really interesting journey to me to create color photographs and then especially getting into Lightroom and like moving dials and sliders and not seeing any change.

speaker-0 (04:53.708)
So how do you do?

Kidding aside, it's red green color blind. So I see other colors. And the way I deal with it is either one, I have a friend, his name is Ken Lee. He's also color blind as a photographer. And he gave me some tips about adjusting like the saturation so you could see what it's impacting and the contrast so you could see like where it's impacting and then bringing it back down. Or the other way is just close my eyes and think my photos are amazing and not know that the greens and the reds are all wrong.

It's nice not to live in reality.

I'm professional at that. So I a friend, his name is Steve Anchill. He is a photographer and a while back he's just like, just shoot black and white, but I like color. I guess maybe it's because I can't see it, but I like it. And so I would love to talk to you about your take on black and white versus color and also when black and white might be more appropriate, what it achieves versus what color achieves and how you can shoot in both and why go one way or the other.

Okay, so first of all, I'm going to go backwards. One of the people that found me on YouTube, I'm not going to mention the name, and started following me on Instagram, every person that writes me a comment, I answer it. And every single person that follows me on Instagram, I go to their account, look at it and try to find one photo that moves me and like it. So this specific person has taken

speaker-0 (06:22.26)
His thing is that he posts a photo in black and white and color. And I don't like that. I think we need to make a decision. It can be all the time, black and white, can be all the time color or one or the other whenever. I think there's a laziness or we need to make a decision. The same way I talked about the photo essay, like we get so emotionally attached.

to our images. But when we take, you know, 200 images on a street photography outing, they're not all good. I mean, the master street photographers didn't have all the photographs that they considered good. And I said in my last video, I don't know if you had time to watch it, I mentioned to neighbors of ours where the husbands got a good eye. He's the photographer of the family. said that my husband, he asked me, I want to go to Vietnam. And he's like, oh,

We went there and we have some photo books. So they gave me two photo books, one from North Vietnam, one from South Vietnam, whatever. And it was just boring. Not because I think my photos are better than someone else. It's just too many. What I'm trying to say is make a decision. This photo is going to be black and white. This one's going to be in color. Okay, that's general. Obviously, I may come to you and say, and I have this shot.

really exciting. I love it. Both monochrome and color. That could happen. So there's the obvious answer. If you're trying to show something from the past, there's some kind of nostalgia, black and white. If something is a very high contrast image with strong lights and darks, that's something I love playing with. if it's

You know, that Mediterranean sun in the middle of the day in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv and you get an alleyway and then you just expose for the highlights and you have a very dramatic and mysterious image. Those are usually going to look better in black and white. Obviously, if there's something everyone's wearing a blue shirt or something matching, you'll go with that in color.

speaker-0 (08:45.902)
So those are the general guidelines that I think most people would agree with. I'm not saying anything controversial here. And the real issue is the color adding something. Because when we teach photography, when I teach a beginning student, the first thing I say is when you're capturing something and you're looking through the viewfinder, you want to put in as much as you can that has to do with your subject and get rid of as much as possible that's distracting.

Obviously sometimes you can't, some things stay shared. So you can say the same thing. Color could be the distraction that you need to get rid of. And black and white is making a comeback. know, it's like, I have a few film cameras. I've been taking this camera out lately for fun with always,

That's cool. Yeah, I want to try one of those.

It's hard, still hard to get used to. Like I moved to the right because I want to go to the right, but I got to go to the left. It's hard. It's another reason it's good though.

What would you classify that? What kind of camera, like how do you?

speaker-0 (09:50.69)
That's a medium format. It's 120 film. Like, it's a six by six negative, six by six centimeter.

And you look down, right? Yeah. Yeah, you look down from the That's cool.

but tape here what ISO the film was. This is like really, really basic. Some of them, they have a little dial here. No, I'm like, I picked up the camera last week and I said, shoot, I have six more frames and I don't remember what it was. And I guess right.

So I don't know you could see here my your collect. Sure. Yeah. My wife's grandfather who passed away maybe like 15, 20 years ago. These were all his and we had no idea. But then my mother-in-law moved out of her house recently and we did a cleanup and found these. And there's all kinds here. Hold on. I'll show you the one that's cool. And I want to take out and use. I haven't used it yet. this is a Zeiss icon. I'm pretty sure it's from Germany from like

speaker-1 (10:54.094)
pre-World War II. So for our listeners, it's got like this accordion type lens in the front. I opened it now, I don't know how to close it. And so...

That happened to me once that the thing broke and I couldn't close it.

Yeah, I started like jiggling around. I'm like, all right, this thing's totally too much. Yes. I did some research on some of these Zeiss cameras. You Germany used to be like the king of camera manufacturing for World War Two. Japan wasn't even really in the game. And at the time, the cameras that Japan made, they were kind of considered almost like the way Chinese products are today, like copies. And like they were inferior. After World War Two, two things happened. One was Germany's camera factories all got destroyed. They were all bombed.

And so they didn't exist anymore. And then the second thing was the Japanese companies, the Japanese government went to them to ask them to make some type of lenses for the war. And so they got really good at making lenses during World War II. And after the war, there was no more German manufacturing market for cameras. Japan had spent World War II mastering their lenses. And so they went heavy into making cameras and became good

I mean, I knew Germany was good at it, but I didn't know that's how it evolved.

speaker-1 (12:06.594)
That's what I learned. I hope I'm right. One thing that's really interesting that you mentioned in relation to black and white and how the idea that you want to add color if it adds value and kind of remove it if it doesn't. I actually think that's really interesting because that's one of things that I had to learn. I have a long way to go in my photography. But if you look now where I was versus five or six years ago, I mean, it's night and day.

If you read it

speaker-0 (12:28.27)
I also have a long way to go.

I think everyone does, right? Like we all kind of. I'm hoping five years from now you'll look back and. Yes, exactly. Yeah. But one of the things I learned was this idea that, you know, less is more in a lot of cases. And the idea of, when you're composing your frame, you know, some things you want to take things out of it that are distractions are not adding value. And then the thing you mentioned that I completely agree with is with series, less is more people put on social media, they'll dump like 48 photos for a trip, right?

That's what I'd say.

speaker-0 (12:35.958)
it is on you moving forward

speaker-1 (13:00.168)
And the reality is six or seven are good. Like that's a good amount.

the time for that and you could say what you want to say about whatever it is, your trip, even your family, you you just and I'm telling you that with the album, like I love looking at photos, but we all have photos that don't come out great. Don't put it in the book. And then it's a cohesive unit. I've been feeling that more and more every workshop I do, I give two assignments to my students. One, send me your favorite photo. Like what do think is your best photo? Then

I said, tell the story of our outing. I give them a limit, five to 10 photos, which makes you think. And I said that the best photo does not necessarily have to be in that unit of your essay. It might have nothing to do with it. It might just be a beautiful photo composed well, whatever it is. But the unit that's telling the story of about our outing to the market or to the railway station, whatever it is.

your best photo might not really fit in with the group that you've chosen because you need a co-host.

Yeah, it's interesting you say that because like I've learned that but to hear you say it cements it for me because let's just say again six or seven photos from a trip and that eighth photo may have been really good but it has nothing to do with the story and it devalues the whole story.

speaker-0 (14:23.726)
And it's so hard for us to, it's like we're insulting ourselves by taking it out. One of the videos that I made that did well was about light, catching light and finding it wherever. Nothing to do with studio lights, natural. Then this video on the photo essay, four times as well. People I think are thirsting for meaning in whatever it is. And that has something to do with meaning. Cause same thing like you said, less is more. The more you just...

or something else that's meaningful.

I think that that makes total sense and I've had to learn this every day. learning something new on photography.

How do you study? Is it just from reading up, from social media? How do you move forward?

two things I guess I would say. One is social media, a lot of like YouTube and like just getting different perspectives and then going out and practicing what the perspectives are that I've learned. Also what's interesting is having the big photo hunt, I send a newsletter out every Tuesday to our membership. It features the top photos. So every week the community picks their favorite photos. And so I feature the top photos, here are the top photos that you picked and we celebrate the members.

speaker-0 (15:34.243)
How is it chosen, Ken?

On the website, so people go on and they put a photo up on the big photo hunt and they're only allowed one photo a week. Then the community upvotes their favorites. So this go on and then at the end of the week, whichever photo has the most upvotes, whichever 10 photos have the most upvotes, what we call the weekly top 10. So there's that every month when I come out with a new podcast episode, I'll feature the podcast and the newsletter, these things. But one of the things that I've been doing is also now adding a small article that is a photography tip and.

because I'm learning along with everybody else, like I don't know what tips, you know, like I'm not a teacher. So what I do is I am looking for topics and things to then share with our community. And then I go out and practice them. So it's forcing me to practice them.

Right. I do the same thing. I opened a WhatsApp group, but you're welcome, you know, to, can send you the link to it and whoever wants, I mean, do you guys use WhatsApp in America? We're all addicted to it here.

Yeah, I'd say WhatsApp. It's not as saturated as like the rest of the world though.

speaker-0 (16:32.194)
Yeah, we use it a ton. So I opened a WhatsApp group for people all over the world that are on it. And I usually once a week post a tip and I'll put a sample photo that will illustrate the tip. But it also causes me to think and learn and solidify something even if I know it. It's a great way to learn.

it's a terrific way to learn. And it's also, it's a good perspective, because then I get to write in my articles, like, here's what I did, here's what it taught me, and here's what I would challenge you to do. So that's one of the ways that I'm trying to grow.

I actually went to, I'd still go, to a school in Jerusalem called Musrara. It's a famous photography school there. It's an artsy thing and it took me, and I think it's still taking me time to really, you see how the light is on your face, it's nice and even. You see how the light is on my face? That's what Musrara would want.

noticing your light it's amazing

learned so much to do things that are different. So the cool thing about every instructor I had there was, you know, it wasn't like about showing their work. Some of them didn't show us their work ever, which was a little extreme, but they're great teachers out there and you have to know who they are and stay away from the ones that really just want to show off their work. It's fun. It's fun to show your work, but that's not the only way to do

speaker-1 (17:56.034)
I completely agree. By the way, so I noticed your light and I was like, God, I was going to comment on that. And for our audience, it's like the perfect, what, Rembrandt lighting almost.

It's not going, yeah, you see that triangle as I go like, yeah.

There it is. You've got like the shadow on the side.

very proud of me at that school. Like, okay, she's that evenly lit. Your lights also really nice.

no, I've got this big like thing here. So is there anything that our audience could benefit from if you were to tell them one tip to think about black and white versus color photography? What is one thing you would leave them with or one thing that you might leave our audience with?

speaker-0 (18:32.462)
This is what I would say, and I will always, in Jewish tradition, you're always supposed to give credit to somebody that taught you something. So to make a little bit of a long story, when I bought my, when I switched from Nikon film cameras, and my husband and I went in and bought my first digital camera, okay, the D70, Nikon D70. I'm a Sony person now, but it was Nikon. I walked into the store on Jaffa Road.

Me too.

speaker-0 (19:00.258)
bought the camera and then I said, okay, who's going to teach me this now? So one of the workers, his name is Uriad Tudmore, if he hears this, tell him I gave him credit. He said, I will. So we started, I paid him for private lessons. We became very close friends. And one of the many, many things he taught me, I bet I alluded to a little at the beginning, was finding these very high contrast scenes.

exposing for the highlights, which means you're really closing out the shadows. And I found that those shots are so beautiful and so much fun to change into black and white. It's the essence. And I love doing that in street photography because unless you're on an overcast day, then you're doing different kinds of photos. But for the most part in this country from March till October,

Quite often you get strong sun. I love going out in the middle of the day, which is not the golden hour. It's not the blue hour. It's not sunrise. I'm looking for hard shadows. Look for extreme situations. It's counterintuitive because we're told to go out in the beautiful time. Look for those extreme situations. Expose extremely. Rolls for the highlights and develop those in your development module or wherever you're post-processing in black and white.

and I think it'll bring you lot of satisfaction in computing.

I've been doing a lot of beach photography, like beach scenes in harsh light and I've enjoyed it. And then I kind of like try to fade out the photo a little bit. I'm playing around, I'm trying to figure out how.

speaker-0 (20:35.992)
for sure.

speaker-0 (20:44.526)
So much, I mean, there's so much, there's that, can, I don't use Photoshop too often. I use Lightroom 99.9 % because I'm doing batches of events. And then I use the Lightroom as well for my street and landscape. But in the Photoshop program, there's all these cool monochrome. Monochrome isn't just black and white. Monochrome just means a tone, one tone. You can go into duotones, there's cool stuff you can do. And the same holds true.

Those will look best and most interesting in those high contrast situations. They may also look good in other situations. I'm asking everyone to go out in midday and look for alleyways and look for shafts of light coming through and then kill it. Go extreme.

when I put this episode out, I'm gonna do this and practice it and write my article about this. All right, Rebecca, so I ask three questions of every guest on this podcast. You're a guest on this podcast. And so I've got three questions for you. Are you ready? All right, first question is, what camera system do you use?

It's fun.

speaker-0 (21:49.454)
Not waiting.

speaker-0 (21:54.734)
So I'm Sony all the way. My history was Pentax as a teenager, Nikon as the beginning of my professional Nikon film, Nikon digital. Then when I moved to mirrorless, I used Panasonic Lumix, which I loved. They didn't have full frame at the time. I moved to Sony and I love Sony.

I love Sony too. When I started, was using Canon and then switched and loved it never went back, obviously. And then have this little guy, he's awesome. It's a Ricoh GR3.

That's supposed to be fantastic to go out with street photography without me schlepping my... Maybe they'll sponsor me Ken for my YouTube.

If they spawn to you, we're gonna be friends because this thing is amazing. I mean, we're friends, but we're gonna really good friends. Better friends.

I better friends. I don't want the camera so much, I want to be better friends.

speaker-1 (22:45.966)
So this is a GR3, they just came out with a GR4 that's supposed to be even better. But this thing, it's, you you put it in your pocket, no one takes you seriously because they think it's a toy. the quality, I mean, it's just the quality is amazing. It's some of my best photos are with it. And people are like, what'd you take that with? You must have a nice camera. Like that's my Ricoh.

I have so many things on my list. I need nothing. Whenever I have, can work with, but I have a lot of things on my list.

Yeah, me too. All right, question number two, and I think I may have done these out of order. What's your favorite genre to shoot and why?

Whoa, that is a tough one. You know, when I listen to business lectures, it's like, you know, niche down. If you're an expert in wedding photography, an expert in this, that's not me. My son's a real estate agent. So I sometimes do photos of houses for him. I don't enjoy it. I do it to do it for him. But basically everything else I love. Street photography, event photography. I love the people. I love.

the energy you give and take and making them feel good and comfortable. They're a great time. I love landscape photography. If you had a gun in my head and said I had to pick one, hmm, so it would either go event or street. And if it wasn't an issue of supporting myself, I'd probably say street.

speaker-1 (24:12.878)
All right, the third question is, on a scale of one to 10, one being the least, 10 being the most, how often do you get that burning itch, not to be confused with a burning itch, that burning itch to go out and shoot?

I am obsessive. Luckily, I have a wonderful husband and family. They put up with it. My husband has said, are we going to have a vacation where you do not take the camera? And I say, no.

I go through the same thing. It's kind of the point where my wife, like, so we were in Nantucket last week and my wife got to the point one day we were walking around and she's like, here, just, you know, we're going to go over here. Just I'll see you in a few hours. And she just like, lets me go.

Yeah. You have to have a good spouse that really gets you. It's hard, but I'm always with the camera once in a while. I'm not, but I have my phone. So I have the Samsung S 25 ultra. I use expert raw or promo. One of the biggest dilemmas I have is running in the morning. That's every day I work out. So if I go running, I'm missing the good light to take photos. But if I do the photography first, then I might not push myself to do the workout. So I.

sometimes they compromise by running and I have the phone and it comes out a lot to get photos.

speaker-1 (25:33.55)
Rebecca, do want everyone to know where they can find you. Your website, your photography, and on YouTube, just everything, Rebecca Kowalsky.

Yeah, so the YouTube is, which is just so much fun that it's growing, is Rebecca Kowalski photo, R-E-B-E-C-C-A-K-O-W-A-L-S-K-Y photo. The Facebook is Rebecca Kowalski, save spelling. Instagram is Rebecca Kowalski So it's 1-B-2-C as I said, R-E-B-E-C-C-A-K-O-P-H-O-T-O. Those are very active. My website,

He's now focusing on my fine art, which people have ordered from. And that's my official company name, www.imagesthroughtime.com. The full word, T-H-R-O-U-P-H. And I'd love to hear from everybody. I'd love, I really pay attention to the people that pay attention to me. I believe in going back and forth.

If you want to just get some amazing tips, if you want to catch a glimpse of that amazing Mediterranean light, if you just want to be entertained by Rebecca, check her out on YouTube and check out her photos on Instagram and everything in between. I am really thankful. I've loved chatting with you. And again, I wish I could talk forever, but the more I talk, the more I have to edit and we're all in trouble.

I get it, I'm at a wedding, I'm like, stop taking pictures of tense angles of it. Yes, I get it. This has been wonderful. Thanks for reaching out. And I think we're going to be photography friends forever. I'm going to try to get the Rico though.

speaker-1 (27:13.134)
Do that, do that. And if not, when I come over there, I'll let you use mine and you can see and you'll fall in love. Then you're wanna buy one.

They have a choice. Okay, enjoy the kids and thank you and I look forward to being part of your community.

Thank you so much, Rebecca. Bye bye. Thank you so much for joining me for today's episode. Our next show will feature more valuable stories from our community members. If you'd like to audition to be a guest, please visit bigphotohunt.com for more information. Thanks again for listening today.