Black And White Photography - An Introduction to Black and White Photography

While photography started out with black and white results (the color tints came from printing processes), once color negatives were introduced black and white photography quickly became less prominent. Eventually black and white photography lost popularity as it became more expensive to process black and white film than color film. The rise of digital photography further pushed black and white photography into the background. Today only certain labs process true black and white film and use actual black and white process paper. However, black and white photography is not gone by any means and it is worth learning about as it can be a very effective photographic tool.

Black and white photography focuses more on light intensity and contrast than color photography. When color is stripped away details of objects become more prominent to the eye and different parts of a scene can become more important than in a color image. Almost every image can work as a black and white photograph. The main exception to this are compositions that rely on color to tell the story. For example, an image of a purple flower amidst a group of yellow flowers, will not have the same impact in black and white as in color.

So what makes a good black and white photograph?
Like so much of photography, this is often a matter of personal taste. However, there are a few items that can really help the impact of a black and white photograph.

• Wide Range of Tones
  Having a wide range of shades of black/grey and white can help add a strong sense of depth to your black and white images. Images that are literally only black and white (or close to it) create an almost illustration effect, like an ink pen drawing without shading.


• Contrast
  Because black and white depends on shading to help show boundaries between items, good contrast between objects (via color or lighting) is a great help in creating a strong black and white image. While we usually try to find colors that do not clash with one another in color photography, clashing colors can help create contrast when captured as black and white.


• Good Lighting
  Good lighting is an almost universal need in photography. With black and white photography it can be even more important as a slight shadow becomes a charcoal grey over whatever is in it. With black and white photography it can be much more difficult to recover details in shadow after capture than with color film.