Introduction to digital black & white photography

Even after so many years of color film, and now digital, black & white still has a strong position in photography. Why?

Partly because of the great inheritance of old monochrome masters like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Edward Weston and (many) others. Monochrome is for many strongly associated with and often favored for reportage photography (even today), especially for “serious” topics like war, poverty and suffering.

But monochrome also has an artistic leverage. It is by many viewed as more serious than color, which is often considered a distracting element. As I will come back to below, removing color puts emphasis on other artistic qualities in a photograph.

This is the first article in a planned series of articles covering monochrome photography. This first article discusses monochrome photography in general, while the upcoming articles will mostly cover small topics in a little more depth, some with hands-on case studies.

Monochrome in the digital age

Before digital, the choice of color versus monochrome had to be taken before shooting. Today, you can browse through your images and decide if any of them would perhaps be better off as monochrome. And some photos may work equally well in both versions, though differently.

Film is monochrome, and so is the sensor in your digital camera. To achieve color, your sensor is covered with a filter (usually a Bayer filter) that records the color information in the light coming through your lens. So in digital photography, the end result is always a color photo, meaning that the color must be removed to achieve monochrome. Sounds quirky?

This is actually a great advantage! In digital post-processing, the tonal response of each hue can be adjusted separately. This means that you can use the original color information to apply local tonal adjustments during post-processing.

Some colors have similar brightness values. This means that if you convert a photo to monochrome, some colors look fairly identical in grey, resulting in loss of contrast, depth or detail.

Example:

Consider a photo that contains two colors that are equally bright, like red and green. If this photo is converted plain into monochrome, the distinction between these two elements can barely be seen. If the photo depicts a red ball in front of a green wall, the ball would all but disappear for lack of contrast between the two. A film photographer could counter this by applying a filter in front of the lens, but the decision had to be taken in advance. With digital, you can adjust the red color information afterward, applying the contrast that was lost during default conversion.

Learn more about color in the article “Color in photography – Color theory“

Effects of removing color

One of the main arguments against color is that it often serves as a distracting element. When you remove color, a lot more attention is then guided to shape and form within your photo. In our world of color abundance, there may be several brightly colored elements screaming for attention from the viewers. Sometimes so much so that the main subject lose some of its power. Remove the colors, and the eye immediately analyze other qualities of the scene.

This is true in all situations, of course, not only photography. For every element that is removed, more focus is concentrated on the elements that remain.

Another effect is that you get a lot more leeway in what level of adjustments people will accept. This is because monochrome never directly represents normality, being devoid of color. You can therefore allow yourself to pull harder on the controls to manipulate a photo, and still produce acceptable results. There is a lot of psychology in this. If something is close to reality, our mind will not accept much alteration to it before we will view it as just that; altered. But as monochrome is already a big leap from representing reality as it is, then we will accept a great deal more. (I am pretty sure that the color version of the feature photo on top of this article would not have endured the amount of adjustments made to the monochrome version, but in monochrome I think it looks great!)

Which photos are suitable for monochrome?

Of course, there are no absolutes here. Over-simplified, you might say that any photo where color is not an important part is suitable. But that’s not very helpful, is it? Here’s a few rules of thumb to store in the back of your head:

If color creates conflict – Color can create conflicts on multiple levels. It might be colors that don’t go well together or colors that are just unpleasing to look at. But most often, it will be subordinate elements in the photo that steal attention from the main subject because they are brightly colored. Or maybe a subordinate element has the same color as the main subject, and therefore needs to be subdued? In this situation, you might also consider using both color and monochrome, with the use of selective coloring.

If color does not add to the photo – If the color in a photo does not do anything to enhance a photo or add to the overall quality, removing color may be an advantage.

If your main subject’s shape or form is a little subdued (or you just want to emphasize it) – Sometimes, your main subject may be a little subdued by its surroundings. If, for example, your subject is a rocky formation in the middle of the woods, the multitude of different green tones, leaves and twigs may create a chaotic appearance. Removing color may reduce the chaos and force the eyes to focus more on shape and form.

If you want to create (or emphasize) a somber mood – Monochrome, especially low-key, is great for emphasizing melancholy, seriousness, sadness, somberness etc.

If you aim for simplicity – Fewer elements may simplify your photo.

If the dynamic range is very high – A very high dynamic range forces you to accept clipping either in the shadows or in the highlights. Most people are more prone to accept loss of information in shadow areas. And as we are naturally accustomed to monochrome environments with lots of dense shadows (whenever we’re in the dark), we will also more readily accept loss of shadow detail in monochrome photos than in color.

If you want an “artsy” look – For many, monochrome is more associated with art than is color.

Or the best reason of them all:

If you just love black & white photography!

Shooting for monochrome

Having said that the path to digital monochrome is always via color, I didn’t mean that monochrome photography now is merely a post-processing activity. With experience you will enhance your creative vision and learn to anticipate what type of scenes, lighting and composition will work well in monochrome. Shooting for monochrome means that you have the resulting monochrome image in mind even before you start shooting. It means that you plan and compose your photo for monochrome.

What this entails is that you are able to visualize how the resulting scene will (or should) look in monochrome. A photographer experienced in monochrome will look at the colors in a scene and be able to see how these colors translate into monochrome, or even be able to look through them. You can learn that too!

The road ahead

What I aim to do in the following articles is to give you a better understanding of the differences between color and monochrome, and help you learn to think in black and white. I also hope to provide a little toolbox that you can use when digging into your existing photos to create exciting monochrome photographs.

If you liked this post, you may also like:

1. HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography – An introduction