B&W photography

Mike Bedford reveals the secrets of good black and white photography, an art form that stands alongside its more colourful counterpart.

Credit: www.gimp.org

GIMP

OUR EXPERT

Mike Bedford once attended a landscape photography course. However, it’s taken him a few years to convert his photos to black and white.

QUICK TIP 

Different colour channels contain varying amounts of digital noise.

This will be important if you want to display your black and white photo as a large print, and could influence your choice of how much of each colour channel to use in the mix.

E astman Kodak introduced Kodachrome, the first mass market colour film, in 1935. Yet this didn’t relegate black and white photography to the history books. Take, for example, Ansel Adams, one of the best-known landscape photographers. He might have started his career before colour film became widely available, but his work continued into the 1970s and his most recognisable photos are black and white.

The artistic potential of this media isn’t lost on many modern-day photographers, who recognise its scope for dramatic effects. If you want a bit more evidence, you’ll find no shortage of landscape photo libraries offering black and white, while some such as www.davebutcher. co.uk specialise in monochrome exclusively. It’s not just landscape photographers who are drawn to this form of photography either. Wedding photographers often offer back and white as part of the mix, for example.

At first sight, it might seem that photographing in monochrome is easy, and certainly no more challenging than working in colour. However, it’s an artform in its own right and you’re not going to get the best from this media without learning how to master it. Ultimately, the best way to become an expert is to have lots of practice and hone your skills over time.

If you’re inspired to try your hand at black and white photography, though, there are some key skills that you’ll need to acquire, and our aim here is to introduce you to these basic principles and techniques.

Here we see how several very different black and white images can be created from a colour photo: desaturated; red component; green component; and finally, blue component.

Straight from the camera

Most cameras are able to take black and white photos. However, using your camera’s built-in black and white mode isn’t a good idea, and the first important reason applies to any special effects that your camera might offer. The effect might look good in the viewfinder, but if you take just that single photo, you’ll only ever have the modified version of the shot. Specifically, you won’t be able to undo that effect if you subsequently decide you’d like to see the scene as you saw it with your eyes. If, on the other hand, you take an ordinary photo, you can apply any effects you want later using photomanipulation software. So, to come back to our theme of black and white photography, if you choose that option in your camera, it’ll disregard all of the colour information – something that you won’t be able to restore in photo editing.