Black & White/Monochrome

[Reschsmooth]

For those of you who take/convert B&W/mono images, do you take the images with the conversion in mind? That is, do you see the image in B&W/mono in your mind's eye or do you take the image, review it and think "that will look good in B&W/mono?"

I went down to Blues Point yesterday morning with the Bronica to take some early morning city scapes. I shot both Velvia 50 & Ilford FP4+ (which I subsequently over-exposed - rookie mistake). Even though I was shooting Velvia, my mind was still looking at the scene in a B&W context.

[PiroStitch]

I usually picture the scene with black and white in mind, making specific notes of the light and shadows (I guess that's what seeing it in black and white means). I tend to set my camera to black and white, so I shoot both NEF and JPG or DNG and JPG, depending on the camera. I will only use the RAW file to process the photo and use the JPG as reference.

Hope that helps

[Remorhaz]

A bit of both but perhaps slightly more of the planning in advance. If I'm shooting street or architecture or with the 10 stop ND for instance I'm probably more thinking of a monochrome end result. However there are other times I've been looking at an image in Lightroom thinking that would make a nice monochrome.

[Mr Darcy]

I rarely go out to specifically take a monochrome image so I tend to use the "I wonder if that will look good in B&W" approach. Sometimes that happens while I a looking at the scene, but more often it happens while I am scanning the images in Post.

[CraigVTR]

I must say that Iam preety much like Greg in that I will think about B&W when looking at the image in post.

[Murray Foote]

I used to print colour rather than mono in the film era so never thought in terms of b&w then and the filters you might need. Sometimes these days I will think that there might be a mono image forthcoming when I take a shot but usually not. There's so much you can do in post processing it's probably difficult to fully pre-visualise mono images these days.

Some time I go for a mono image because colour doesn't work due to technical problems or because the colour is distracting and sometimes because I look at something and think "that will work well in mono". Sometimes I do a quick batch mono conversion of a whole lot of images to see which may work best in mono.

[Matt. K]

With film I always saw the image in monochrome if I was shooting B&W film. But now shooting digital , I always see the image in colour and only occasionally convert to B&W if I can see that it would suit the image. Here's a recent example, subject is Peter Stubbs...Fuji X10