Black and White

For anybody who follows me on Instagram, it is immediately apparent that I shoot a lot of black and white, besides the usual color all over my website. Actually, depending on the circumstances, my preference for how to approach a project tonally varies markedly. While I rarely get black and white assignments anymore, I really love the look. Back in my teens, when I first started shooting, the people who initially caught my eye were mostly black and white photographers like Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Man Ray, Atget and a bunch of the editorial people at Life magazine. While 95%+ of my assignment work is color these days, I would say my serious personal shooting probably breaks down to about even. Much of this is related to my decade old CACTI TRANSECTS project, and a very strong preference for shooting architecture/urban landscape in black and white.

There are certain things color just will not let you do, and in fact sometimes it even gets in the way.

To that end, please let me identify what I like so much about black and white:

1- Ability to control shadow detail approaches the actual range of our eyes.

2- How inky the blacks and dark grays are.

3- Simultaneous viewing situations where the goal is compare and contrast a lot of chaotic visual information, and tonality will actually subtract from the intended goal.

Specific to this blogpost, we will primarily concentrate on the first two areas. The third category above will be tied to a later blog discussing my Cacti Transects project, a massive ongoing typology. The Praying Cactus image above is from that project.

To address the first point above, I want us to look at the color version of the high rise photo in the cluster above. What we immediately see is a very saturated blue sky along with most of the buildings in shadow, except for one small area where the sun is harshly illuminating the building in the lower right corner of the image. This is generally the midday outcome in color we can expect from either initial digital capture or lower ISO chrome film. To some limited degree, we can adjust in post production, but nothing is ever going make me like the outcome. The blue is still going to overwhelm most everything else in the photo, and the details in the shadows will merely move from near invisible to slightly visible. The color does not support how strong the lines are in the structure, nor allow us to work with the dramatic harsh lighting across the building face in the lower right corner.

From the outset, I actually saw this as a black and white image. The reasons for this were far from complex. The blue is very overwhelming, and takes away from really viewing the light moving across the buildings. Accordingly by shifting to black and white, the shadow details could be further opened up and the blue sky becomes gray. The darkness or lightness of the sky can easily be adjusted for on camera with a red filter, or can be addressed in post production. Note the two differing skies in the two black and white versions of the same photo above.

The other aspect of black and white we want to discuss here is the visual quality of the blacks and dark grays. Generally in color, these tonalities will pick up minute amounts of color due to the color temperature associated with light sources. However in black and white, we are in a pure greyscale universe, unless we want to add a secondary tonal overlay. This results in very deep blacks/charcoal grays that lack any tonal drift whatsoever. This allows for a feel of things emerging out of darkness, with an exaggerated sense of contrast between our subject and the darker background in the image.

The photo of the piece of Selenite, a transparent type of gypsum, above demonstrates this outcome, where the photo is almost totally comprised of the lighter and darker ends of grayscale with limited mid tone operating in the image. This is a photo concerned with line, form and contrast. Color information here would actually subtract from the visual goal rather than enhance it. In removing any of the residual tonalities of our stone from the photo, we can concentrate far more easily on the issues of real concern in this image. This is an example of subtracting info to elevate visual impact.