Digital Photography in Black and White
Where’s the Respect?
Black and white photography gets such little respect in this age of digital photography. You might find it used in a retro style, sepia-toned wedding photo, but you just don’t see it used as much as it could even though it can be used to produce such a wonderful imagery and photographs.
So why am I thinking about black and white photography again? Well, the simple truth is that I was in a furniture store with my wife the other day. She was looking at fabrics and talking to a designer and I thought I’d browse the store for a while. Sure, I like looking at certain furniture styles and period pieces, but what I find most interesting is the artwork that has been chosen by the designers to go with each furniture setting.
Pure Design in Black and White
Typically the artwork shown in a higher end showroom are mostly about pure design, shape and color rather than anything to do with the art or artist behind the image. This focus on pure design is what makes these types of showrooms a bit more interesting for me.
On this day, this furniture studio (Gabberts) had several photographs hanging in their showroom and I came across a couple of black and whites that really caught my eye. They were abstract and you couldn’t really tell what the main subject was, but the shapes and textures and gradations worked so well together that it just grabbed my attention. They looked like abstract charcoal drawings with a very feathery use of sharpness and shading. In addition, the quality of the framing and the wide matting really made them standout.
So, we got home from the store and I started thinking about how to best create a black and white image in the digital age. In the days of film you would purchase black and white film, shoot your photos, develop the negatives using black and white chemicals and then recreate the photograph on paper that was specifically developed for black and and white prints. It was a lot of work, but I find it rather sad that this process is slowly disappearing.
How It’s Done In The Digital Camera Age
Now that I have a digital camera though, I’m learning how to best create a black and white image. Would it be better to shoot it as a black and white or bring it into Photoshop or Light Studio and remove all of the color there?
I chose to shoot it as a black and white image for a couple of reasons. First, I could make adjustments to the exposure in camera, right on the spot. With a black and white image, tone becomes the overall color and if it’s off even a little, the image quality turns out poorly. Secondly, when shooting in black and white, the way that shapes and patterns play off one another becomes much more evident. This is much harder to visualize if you are shooting in color.
It’s All About The Composition
I’ve just started to shoot in black and white again and I’ve only taken a couple of shots that I like enough to show-off, for example the one shown above that I took the other day. Sure, black and white photographs are much easier to create than they were in the days of film, but one aspect of this has not changed. Black and white imagery is an extremely challenging format when it comes to creating an interesting and well composed image from an artistic perspective. Without color, the shapes, patterns and negative space become the primary elements of the composition.
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