Black & White Photography For Dummies
Posted: Wed Aug 19, 2009 1:22 pmBlack & White Photography For Dummies
(and everyone else who hasn't met me before...)
This was originally posted on Facebook (I wrote it) but I've decided to stick it here too.
I've been doing black & white photography long enough to understand some things about it and a lot of people have been telling me what I do is good so I thought I'd share a few pointers here.
If you happen to disagree with any, that's fine. I don't expect my opinion to be absorbed and appreciated by all. Just be aware that I've been helping people learn photography, cameras, Photoshop, and all manner of fun optics bits for quite a while, and I'm not just any guy with a digital camera.
My name is Leigh D. Stark and I'm 25. I've grown up practically in darkrooms and despite the chemicals being toxic as all hell, it feels great when I'm in one.
Now, to people who recently bought cameras in the past year or two:
1. You are not a professional.
If you own a digital SLR, that does not make you a professional.
I don't care whether you spent $2,000 to $7,000 or more on it, or whether it says "What professionals use" on the box. You are not a professional. You have a digital SLR. Get over it.
2. Having a camera does not make you a photographer.
You take pictures. Good for you. So does every person on the planet these days. Cameras are in phones, portable music players, watches, computers, digital address books, and heaven forbid the cameras themselves.
But just because you have a camera DOES NOT make you a photographer. It means you have a camera.
3. You are not a professional, so stop fucking acting like one.
Seriously, did you not read point 1? Stop acting like a professional. Don't carry your kit around you and think you understand what's going on. Don't lie about your skills in order to make some of us think you're better.
Hell, do you even know what the "SLR" bit in DSLR means, or do you have to whip out your iPhone and read from the Wiki whenever someone asks you? (Heaven forbid someone asks you what a "TLR" is...)
Just be cool with the knowledge that you have a camera and you're about to take a walk on that very long trip of being better.
Now let's get into the area that I love. Black and white.
1. A colour image is not a black & white image.
It should be pretty self-evident, but you'd be surprised how many people just don't get it, so let me say it again incase the whole "number next to the words" didn't drive it through as a point:
A colour image is not a black & white image.
Okay, okay. So it seems like I'm patronising you.
I'm not.
I am saying it because the qualities of a colour image are very different from that of a black and white.
A colour image can be anything but what it has against the monochromatic is just that: the colour. Believe it or not, those millions & billions of colours (those numbers are very dependent on your screen) actually change the way a scene looks.
Imagine what you'd see if you suffered from colour blindness or achromatopsia and everything was in grey with sheer overblown whites any time you saw the light.
In colour, everything you see connects something else, but in black & white, you've got a limited colour space to work with so you need to think about things like shadow, shape, contrast, and a whole bunch of other bits we'll get to further down the page.
2. Black & White is not a cop-out and it will not save your ass.
With the advent of Photoshop and other photo-editing applications, every Tom, Dick, Harry, and Claudia thinks they can automatically make anything that doesn't look good into a black & white and it'll instantly look good. People with different names think that too. This means you.
But this just isn't the case because the situation is actually more like this: if you have shot a crappy image in colour, it will continue to look like crap in black & white. In fact, it'll be just as crappy but with less emphasis on colour and more emphasis on how much of a douche you were for thinking it would look better this way.
Plain and simple (and referencing Point 1 above), a colour image is a colour and a black & white is a black & white. If you shoot for the right things specific to each, you'll end up with an image that works for those qualities (of which I'm going to sort of explain in the next few points).
3. Composition is critical.
An image in black & white is very different to that of a colour one. You've probably worked that out: you're so smart.
One has colour, one doesn't (well sort of).
But because you're making an image that lacks colour, vibrancy, and often enough chaos to draw the eye away from everything and only look at specific points, you need to make sure your composition doesn't suck.
I cannot stress this enough, and I say this because most photographers (yes, you included) will never realise just how bad their composition is until someone points it out.
If you can't compose naturally - and many photographers simply don't have an "eye" for it, so to speak - then use the techniques we all pass on. Use lines, diagonals, foreground/background, threes, quadrants.
Do something. Anything. Just don't keep taking the same badly composed shots.
Random Tip #68!
Shoot a bowl of fruit. Sure, you might think you're too good for a bowl of fruit, the most classic of the compositions used in art for centuries, but trust me... if you think that, you're absolutely not. So grab a bowl, buy some fruit, and take pictures of it and start to work out & understand the basics of composition. I assure you, the organic models won't mind and you can devour them afterwards. Like a praying mantis devours its lover... yummy.
4. Detail is nice.
Despite the name, "black & white" isn't about either the blacks or the whites. It's about the bits in the middle. The full colour range that starts from a deep black and goes all throughout what shadow & contrast have to offer, before finally hitting the stark white that a vibrant image can smack you in the face with.
So when I see a black & white that someone has made that lacks this sort of understanding, I throw up a little bit in my mouth.
'This is not a black & white,' I think to myself. 'This is an image put together by someone who doesn't understand light and how it falls, especially in monochrome.'
What you need to do is keep some detail. Bring out some of the areas and make them glow, fall into the shadows, pop from the page and almost have a 3D look to them as if you could reach out and rip them from the picture.
Without detail, your black & white is as dull as everything else.
5. Do you even understand light?
Photography is all about light. Let's look at the Greek origins shall we (bet you didn't think you'd learn anything today, eh?)...
Remember, we're dealing in "light" here and not "pixels".
So because we're working with light, this means you basically have to understand light to capture the right sort of scene & information.
If you don't quite get what I mean and think this is all a load of crap, stop for a second and go outside. Find somewhere where the sun is casting shadows. Now look at those shadows and find something brilliant about them.
If you take a photo of a shed where part of the building is obscured by shadows and you shoot for a colour image specifically, all you're going to get is a colour image of a shed with darker bits thanks to the shadows.
But the moment you start seeing the shadows as shapes that the light is making up, you'll start to understand light and all its intricacies.
I'm not saying you'll have a clue about it, but you'll at least be getting the general idea, and not just shooting a darkened shed.
Oh, and if you don't understand light, don't go around claiming you do. If you really need some help, go out with someone who "gets it" and have them explain it to you as you use your camera. Trust me, it'll begin to make sense from that point on.
6. Technique
Technique is ridiculously important, and it's not something you're going to get overnight.
It's not an issue of RTFM (Read The <Fine or Fucking> Manual) nor is it an issue of having the best piece of equipment money can buy. It's all about practice and learning. I don't care what you've got. You could shoot on an old Nikon FE2, a Canon PowerShot, or even a Nikon D300 (which is what I use), the skills of the user will determine just how good the shot looks.
But even if you read the manual, buy several books, attend classes, or ask me to help you out (which I've been known to do on occasion), you won't get this knowledge overnight and it is completely foolish for you to expect so.
It happens with time, practice, and a shit load of fuck-ups.
And no, your fuck-ups ARE NOT examples of technique; they're examples of fuck-ups and fluke.
7. The Film Dilemma
While digital is becoming increasingly popular, a lot of you are switching to film.
You think it's classic, soft, and probably beautiful, and you're not wrong. But a lot of the time, people are assuming that just because something has been shot on film, it is automatically art.
It's not.
Much like digital, it's likely to be a bad shot that just so happened to take place on film.
In photography, we have a ratio for good images out of every image shot. That ratio is much more noticeable now as photographers can shoot and shoot and shoot (on digital) and still end up with crap shots. That's fine. We all start with crap ratios.
But on film, the ratio is much harder because with a roll of 36, that's between 36 (ok, 34 to 38 depending on how you roll it on) images you have to shoot. So naturally, you must think that each shot must be worth more and therefore better!
Which isn't the case. Much like how we said in the beginning, a crap image is still a crap image no matter the colouring of it or the media it was shot on.
Shooting in film doesn't make you any more of an artist, even if it can be a lot more fun to shoot on.
Finally, there are some things you need to know to be a photographer, if this is where you want to actually be. These are little things, but still quite important.
1. Patience
This is quite possible the most important thing you'll ever need to know if you want to take photos: be patient.
Seriously.
This job, hobby, game, profession, skill, talent, technique, method, love, hate, joy, trade, and passion is all reliant on you being able to shut the fuck up and be patient for a little bit.
Things have certainly gotten a little bit easier from when we worked in darkrooms and we did test strip after test strip hoping to hell it worked, finding the science behind every shot, and then praying that next day the chemical solution wasn't so different that we would have to do this all again.
These days, it's all about the digital image and that's certainly a hell of a lot faster than that of the ones captures on little bits of plastic with emulsion on them.
But you still need the patience for the perfect shot in that you want it to come to you, not the other way around.
You still need the patience if you're planning to do any post-processing on your images through applications like Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, and even Picasa. Mostly Photoshop because of the whole "blank canvas" approach Photoshop has, but if you're interested to learn and are blown away by it all, find some tutorials online, ask a friend, or download a trial of Photoshop Elements to get your head in the right working space.
And be patient as you work because it's not easy at first. Hell, it's not even that easy until you're a pro.
Mostly though you need patience if you want to understand photography. There's a lot of terms and equipment and software and printing technology and filters and paper types and cameras and all sorts of bits and pieces that could easily fill every room in your house if you were so inclined.
You need to realise that this is a big area - a huge area, in fact - and because of that, if you lack the patience to let this all seep into that big wrinkly bit in your head, you will lose.
2. Thick-skin
If there's one thing living has probably taught you by now it's that everyone has an opinion, and most of us will gladly take the time out of our lives to tell you how much you suck as often as we can.
It's not a fact, it's an opinion. Just remember that.
And likewise for your images, if I say they suck, it's not a fact but rather an opinion.
But if you get all fussy and annoyed, if you're insulted by even the most tiny quibble that someone has against your work, you won't be a photographer for very long.
The truth of the matter is that most of your images probably aren't very good, but that's ok because you like them right?
Really, that's all that matters.
Regardless, you can't chuck a shit for people not liking your work. It's not an insult against you, it's a view of your work. And perhaps some good will come out of it. Perhaps you weren't happy with how that printed especially with how it looked on screen. Perhaps the composition wasn't that brilliant but you went with it anyway. Perhaps, perhaps, a lot of freakin' perhaps.
The point of all of this is to grow a thick skin if you haven't yet because if you don't, you'll fail here too.
Patience and being able to take criticism, they're pretty big factors.
For some of you, this will be a lot to take in. For others, you won't even bother reading it. You'll look at some of the points, gloss over them and go "yup, I get it, I'm doing that now" even though you're doing little of it and generally being a wannabe classic photographer.
If you do that, it's generally pretty easy to pick up on it in your photos. Just giving you a heads up. The regular person might not notice, but photographers who are worth their weight will.
This is also just a piece that carries a lot of opinion. I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography, a semi-respected opinion, and have fired more shots off in the past five years than most of you will in your life (with the exception of sports photographers and paparazzi, both of which I've done).
Without making this sound too much like an ego piece on "Why you should listen to me," I'm going to say flat out that I don't care if you do or don't. Do what you want. It's your imagery.
Just don't come running to people like me for help when the stuff your churning out looks like crap on a page.
(and everyone else who hasn't met me before...)
This was originally posted on Facebook (I wrote it) but I've decided to stick it here too.
I've been doing black & white photography long enough to understand some things about it and a lot of people have been telling me what I do is good so I thought I'd share a few pointers here.
If you happen to disagree with any, that's fine. I don't expect my opinion to be absorbed and appreciated by all. Just be aware that I've been helping people learn photography, cameras, Photoshop, and all manner of fun optics bits for quite a while, and I'm not just any guy with a digital camera.
My name is Leigh D. Stark and I'm 25. I've grown up practically in darkrooms and despite the chemicals being toxic as all hell, it feels great when I'm in one.
Now, to people who recently bought cameras in the past year or two:
1. You are not a professional.
If you own a digital SLR, that does not make you a professional.
I don't care whether you spent $2,000 to $7,000 or more on it, or whether it says "What professionals use" on the box. You are not a professional. You have a digital SLR. Get over it.
2. Having a camera does not make you a photographer.
You take pictures. Good for you. So does every person on the planet these days. Cameras are in phones, portable music players, watches, computers, digital address books, and heaven forbid the cameras themselves.
But just because you have a camera DOES NOT make you a photographer. It means you have a camera.
3. You are not a professional, so stop fucking acting like one.
Seriously, did you not read point 1? Stop acting like a professional. Don't carry your kit around you and think you understand what's going on. Don't lie about your skills in order to make some of us think you're better.
Hell, do you even know what the "SLR" bit in DSLR means, or do you have to whip out your iPhone and read from the Wiki whenever someone asks you? (Heaven forbid someone asks you what a "TLR" is...)
Just be cool with the knowledge that you have a camera and you're about to take a walk on that very long trip of being better.
Now let's get into the area that I love. Black and white.
1. A colour image is not a black & white image.
It should be pretty self-evident, but you'd be surprised how many people just don't get it, so let me say it again incase the whole "number next to the words" didn't drive it through as a point:
A colour image is not a black & white image.
Okay, okay. So it seems like I'm patronising you.
I'm not.
I am saying it because the qualities of a colour image are very different from that of a black and white.
A colour image can be anything but what it has against the monochromatic is just that: the colour. Believe it or not, those millions & billions of colours (those numbers are very dependent on your screen) actually change the way a scene looks.
Imagine what you'd see if you suffered from colour blindness or achromatopsia and everything was in grey with sheer overblown whites any time you saw the light.
In colour, everything you see connects something else, but in black & white, you've got a limited colour space to work with so you need to think about things like shadow, shape, contrast, and a whole bunch of other bits we'll get to further down the page.
2. Black & White is not a cop-out and it will not save your ass.
With the advent of Photoshop and other photo-editing applications, every Tom, Dick, Harry, and Claudia thinks they can automatically make anything that doesn't look good into a black & white and it'll instantly look good. People with different names think that too. This means you.
But this just isn't the case because the situation is actually more like this: if you have shot a crappy image in colour, it will continue to look like crap in black & white. In fact, it'll be just as crappy but with less emphasis on colour and more emphasis on how much of a douche you were for thinking it would look better this way.
Plain and simple (and referencing Point 1 above), a colour image is a colour and a black & white is a black & white. If you shoot for the right things specific to each, you'll end up with an image that works for those qualities (of which I'm going to sort of explain in the next few points).
3. Composition is critical.
An image in black & white is very different to that of a colour one. You've probably worked that out: you're so smart.
One has colour, one doesn't (well sort of).
But because you're making an image that lacks colour, vibrancy, and often enough chaos to draw the eye away from everything and only look at specific points, you need to make sure your composition doesn't suck.
I cannot stress this enough, and I say this because most photographers (yes, you included) will never realise just how bad their composition is until someone points it out.
If you can't compose naturally - and many photographers simply don't have an "eye" for it, so to speak - then use the techniques we all pass on. Use lines, diagonals, foreground/background, threes, quadrants.
Do something. Anything. Just don't keep taking the same badly composed shots.
Random Tip #68!
Shoot a bowl of fruit. Sure, you might think you're too good for a bowl of fruit, the most classic of the compositions used in art for centuries, but trust me... if you think that, you're absolutely not. So grab a bowl, buy some fruit, and take pictures of it and start to work out & understand the basics of composition. I assure you, the organic models won't mind and you can devour them afterwards. Like a praying mantis devours its lover... yummy.
4. Detail is nice.
Despite the name, "black & white" isn't about either the blacks or the whites. It's about the bits in the middle. The full colour range that starts from a deep black and goes all throughout what shadow & contrast have to offer, before finally hitting the stark white that a vibrant image can smack you in the face with.
So when I see a black & white that someone has made that lacks this sort of understanding, I throw up a little bit in my mouth.
'This is not a black & white,' I think to myself. 'This is an image put together by someone who doesn't understand light and how it falls, especially in monochrome.'
What you need to do is keep some detail. Bring out some of the areas and make them glow, fall into the shadows, pop from the page and almost have a 3D look to them as if you could reach out and rip them from the picture.
Without detail, your black & white is as dull as everything else.
5. Do you even understand light?
Photography is all about light. Let's look at the Greek origins shall we (bet you didn't think you'd learn anything today, eh?)...
- Photo - light
- Graph - letter or writing
Remember, we're dealing in "light" here and not "pixels".
So because we're working with light, this means you basically have to understand light to capture the right sort of scene & information.
If you don't quite get what I mean and think this is all a load of crap, stop for a second and go outside. Find somewhere where the sun is casting shadows. Now look at those shadows and find something brilliant about them.
If you take a photo of a shed where part of the building is obscured by shadows and you shoot for a colour image specifically, all you're going to get is a colour image of a shed with darker bits thanks to the shadows.
But the moment you start seeing the shadows as shapes that the light is making up, you'll start to understand light and all its intricacies.
I'm not saying you'll have a clue about it, but you'll at least be getting the general idea, and not just shooting a darkened shed.
Oh, and if you don't understand light, don't go around claiming you do. If you really need some help, go out with someone who "gets it" and have them explain it to you as you use your camera. Trust me, it'll begin to make sense from that point on.
6. Technique
Technique is ridiculously important, and it's not something you're going to get overnight.
It's not an issue of RTFM (Read The <Fine or Fucking> Manual) nor is it an issue of having the best piece of equipment money can buy. It's all about practice and learning. I don't care what you've got. You could shoot on an old Nikon FE2, a Canon PowerShot, or even a Nikon D300 (which is what I use), the skills of the user will determine just how good the shot looks.
But even if you read the manual, buy several books, attend classes, or ask me to help you out (which I've been known to do on occasion), you won't get this knowledge overnight and it is completely foolish for you to expect so.
It happens with time, practice, and a shit load of fuck-ups.
And no, your fuck-ups ARE NOT examples of technique; they're examples of fuck-ups and fluke.
7. The Film Dilemma
While digital is becoming increasingly popular, a lot of you are switching to film.
You think it's classic, soft, and probably beautiful, and you're not wrong. But a lot of the time, people are assuming that just because something has been shot on film, it is automatically art.
It's not.
Much like digital, it's likely to be a bad shot that just so happened to take place on film.
In photography, we have a ratio for good images out of every image shot. That ratio is much more noticeable now as photographers can shoot and shoot and shoot (on digital) and still end up with crap shots. That's fine. We all start with crap ratios.
But on film, the ratio is much harder because with a roll of 36, that's between 36 (ok, 34 to 38 depending on how you roll it on) images you have to shoot. So naturally, you must think that each shot must be worth more and therefore better!
Which isn't the case. Much like how we said in the beginning, a crap image is still a crap image no matter the colouring of it or the media it was shot on.
Shooting in film doesn't make you any more of an artist, even if it can be a lot more fun to shoot on.
Finally, there are some things you need to know to be a photographer, if this is where you want to actually be. These are little things, but still quite important.
1. Patience
This is quite possible the most important thing you'll ever need to know if you want to take photos: be patient.
Seriously.
This job, hobby, game, profession, skill, talent, technique, method, love, hate, joy, trade, and passion is all reliant on you being able to shut the fuck up and be patient for a little bit.
Things have certainly gotten a little bit easier from when we worked in darkrooms and we did test strip after test strip hoping to hell it worked, finding the science behind every shot, and then praying that next day the chemical solution wasn't so different that we would have to do this all again.
These days, it's all about the digital image and that's certainly a hell of a lot faster than that of the ones captures on little bits of plastic with emulsion on them.
But you still need the patience for the perfect shot in that you want it to come to you, not the other way around.
You still need the patience if you're planning to do any post-processing on your images through applications like Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, and even Picasa. Mostly Photoshop because of the whole "blank canvas" approach Photoshop has, but if you're interested to learn and are blown away by it all, find some tutorials online, ask a friend, or download a trial of Photoshop Elements to get your head in the right working space.
And be patient as you work because it's not easy at first. Hell, it's not even that easy until you're a pro.
Mostly though you need patience if you want to understand photography. There's a lot of terms and equipment and software and printing technology and filters and paper types and cameras and all sorts of bits and pieces that could easily fill every room in your house if you were so inclined.
You need to realise that this is a big area - a huge area, in fact - and because of that, if you lack the patience to let this all seep into that big wrinkly bit in your head, you will lose.
2. Thick-skin
If there's one thing living has probably taught you by now it's that everyone has an opinion, and most of us will gladly take the time out of our lives to tell you how much you suck as often as we can.
It's not a fact, it's an opinion. Just remember that.
And likewise for your images, if I say they suck, it's not a fact but rather an opinion.
But if you get all fussy and annoyed, if you're insulted by even the most tiny quibble that someone has against your work, you won't be a photographer for very long.
The truth of the matter is that most of your images probably aren't very good, but that's ok because you like them right?
Really, that's all that matters.
Regardless, you can't chuck a shit for people not liking your work. It's not an insult against you, it's a view of your work. And perhaps some good will come out of it. Perhaps you weren't happy with how that printed especially with how it looked on screen. Perhaps the composition wasn't that brilliant but you went with it anyway. Perhaps, perhaps, a lot of freakin' perhaps.
The point of all of this is to grow a thick skin if you haven't yet because if you don't, you'll fail here too.
Patience and being able to take criticism, they're pretty big factors.
For some of you, this will be a lot to take in. For others, you won't even bother reading it. You'll look at some of the points, gloss over them and go "yup, I get it, I'm doing that now" even though you're doing little of it and generally being a wannabe classic photographer.
If you do that, it's generally pretty easy to pick up on it in your photos. Just giving you a heads up. The regular person might not notice, but photographers who are worth their weight will.
This is also just a piece that carries a lot of opinion. I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography, a semi-respected opinion, and have fired more shots off in the past five years than most of you will in your life (with the exception of sports photographers and paparazzi, both of which I've done).
Without making this sound too much like an ego piece on "Why you should listen to me," I'm going to say flat out that I don't care if you do or don't. Do what you want. It's your imagery.
Just don't come running to people like me for help when the stuff your churning out looks like crap on a page.
At least now we can go out with this seed planted and learn more from it.