Why Black and White Photography?

looking at my print shop (link in menu), a few people have asked me why Black and White photography over colour?

I suppose it goes back to my childhood, in the 1960’s, when Kodak instamatic film cameras were the iPhones of their day. We had little choice to use anything other than black and white film.  Colour film was available but considered a luxury because it was expensive.  Colour film barely existed before the 1940’s.   My generation was brought up using black and white film.  All the newspapers had black and white photography in them, colour being reserved for the colour supplements and magazines.

My motto is “seeing the unusual in the usual”, and this is one of the advantages of black and white photography.  You don’t expect to see black and white!  It is so powerful, evocative, dynamic, dramatic and creative to see black and white images.  Look at the great photographers:  Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Cartier Bresson – even David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Don McCullin, to name but a few, are famed for their black and white images.

Shooting creatively in black and white is not easy because our eyes see in colour.  It requires an understanding of how the image will translate into black and white when you take it.  This is a lot less of a problem in the digital world since you shoot everything in colour then convert it to black and white afterwards. Within my print portfolio, there are quite a few images which were taken on film – can you spot them?  The majority are digital images converted to Black and White from colour originals.  Black and white photographs have multiple shades of grey also, they are, strictly,  monochromatic – a single colour.

When shooting on film using a red filter on the lens you get dramatic black skies, the filter prevents the blue of the sky from recording on the film, thus rendering it black – or grey, depending on how blue the blue is.  The black skies make the clouds pop and become more dramatic.  In digital post production of colour images I do exactly the same thing by filtering out the blue.  These images are not massively post produced.  They treated the same way as they would be treated if they were shot on film and then manipulated in the darkroom.

Of  course I do shoot in colour too.  In due course I will be opening up a colour print section.  There are, however, a few technical hurdles to overcome first.  This has to do with matching the colour you see on a screen with that of the print.  If you are disappointed not to see any colour images here, then visit again, and you may find that some have landed!