The first day that I got the new D700, I took it for a street-test ride...I took something around 500 pictures that day, as usual, with the lens that is with me all the time the 50mm! (In this case the f/1.4 that
I just recent wrote about). At first I didn't post any pictures about that day on any of my "
online" portfolios...Today, it's been quite a few months since then, and organizing and backing up my hard drive I found them again. Maybe from a dream I had about a concept for a shooting (which I'll discuss later because it is great) last night, I woke up with the black and white vibe on my head.
Black and White Photography is really a passion, is my favorite type of photography, it really gets me, and it brings all my passion outside. "It’s raw and refined, natural and unusual, bold and subtle, mysterious and open, emotional and impassive, simple and complex".
Anyway, today I played a little bit with a few ones in Photoshop, and I felt that it would be fun to share a few tips on this type of photography. First of all forget about converting the pictures from the camera itself, sometimes they can be quite good, but on this "
Digital Photography" times, it is perfect to take them in color at first, and then convert them in any software of your preference. If the file is in a RAW format that would be even better, because you will have a file with any type of compression and all the information about the colors.
But before that we need to focus on the picture, putting aside all the rules and techniques about composition and lightning, our main interest on black and white is to focus on two main things, contrast and texture, this two things would be a killer formula to take great pictures. Why contrast? Obviously, the contrast is the difference between the blacks and the whites, so a highly contrast photograph will look more deep and will show all the gray shades in between if you have a great light and colors. Texture, follow contrast for the same reason, things like a wall, fabric, maybe water on the ocean, clouds, will have a great amount of contrast between the main light and the shadows. It also helps to underexpose by one or two stops, so the highlights wont be blowout. Other thing that you can have on mind is to keep the ISO setting as low as possible, noise can be more visible on black and white pictures, that maybe will be part of the picture, maybe an artistic view, but sometimes it is just disturbing.
I hope you find this useful, Black and white is a predominant choice among
masters because it tells the graphic story clearly; it is just simple. You can have a lot of fun, and often get strikingly unusual effects, by experimenting with this genre of photography.
