Us photographers can be a funny bunch, with different views and opinions on what’s the right and wrong way to take a photo and different approaches depending on what genres and styles you wish to practice.
Taking a stealthy shot of a wild animal while trying to be as unobtrusive as possible is clearly very different to the approach of say, Bruce Gilden, who became known for his up close-up – stick a camera in your face and fire the flash approach – two very different ends of the photography spectrum.
However, one area that I think unites us all is that we’d probably all have to admit that we’ve tried to save a ‘bad’ shot at some point by converting it to black and white.
The black-and-white medium of course, stands on its own for its classic, minimalist and timeless aesthetic. Shooting in mono is a legitimate way to remove colorful distractions from your scene, which could potentially pull the eye away from your focal point and where you’re trying to get your viewers to look within your shot.
A handy quick tip if you do want to try black and white photography is to enable your black and white or monochrome picture style in your camera menu. Now when you frame up using the live view on your LCD display or electronic viewfinder, you’ll see your image in black and white, making it easier to compose monochromatically for tone, contrast, shape and form. A top tip here is to also shoot in the RAW file format so you retain all of that color data if you wish to revert to a full color image later on.
Because you don’t have to worry about color detail breaking up when you boost the contrast, you can push the limits of your photograph much harder with a black and white conversion. I’ll admit that I’ve relied on this as a bit of a crutch in some situations when my color photo didn’t pack enough punch on its own, or it was slightly out of focus or had a little bit of camera-shake in them.
While nowadays I’ve worked hard to improve my technique for sharper shots and the better face detection algorithms on my newer cameras have improved my hitrate too, back in the days when I was still honing my craft, it was quite common for me to convert to black and white to save a shot from the trash, and I’m sure many of you can relate to this too.
Got a flat landscape with a blown-out sky? Convert it to black and white and add some digital noise for a gritty, moody scene.
Misfocused slightly on a key moment at a wedding? Fear not! Ramp up the contrast and bring the saturation down to improve the apparent sharpness in your images.
One little extra secret tip I’ll also let you in on is that I keep an older version of Photoshop CC on an old computer so I can still access the powerful Shake Reduction filter which was superb for reducing small amounts of camera shake too, and when paired with a high contrast mono conversion worked rather nicely to make the picture sharp enough to use. Adobe's decision to remove this brilliant shake reduction feature from Photoshop circa 2022 baffles me, but that’s a gripe for another day!
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