MEW Photography: Seeing in Black and White

Today’s assignment was to see in black and white as opposed to colour, which means that we have to think about tone, shade, light and dark.

Colours have 3 main elements: hue, saturation and lightness. Hue is the name of the colour, such as red, yellow, or green. Saturation is the intensity of the colour, while the lightness is the amount of white or black mixed into the colour.

In the most basic terms, hue is what you are taking away from the photograph when you convert to black and white, saturation and lightness, or contrast, are what remain in the grey scale to create tonal contrast. Think of contrast as white vs black and everything in between is shades of grey.

Below is a copy of the zone system used by Ansel Adams

Although there are many things to consider when creating black & white photographs, contrast is at the top. Contrast helps create the mood; a high contrast conveys power and boldness, while a low contrast will evoke a gentler, softer reaction. You need to consider the intention of the shot.

For this assignment we had to use our DSLR cameras. The first thing we had to do was to change our camera settings so that our images would be stored as RAW and JPEG, plus we needed to use the monochrome setting on our cameras.

We were to go around the college taking photographs. We needed to see in black and white, and also to think about a series of images.

I was not sure at first what I wanted to photograph, and just took photographs generally around the college, but after walking around the pond at the back of the college I focused on the branches of the trees, the way they were gnarly, interweaved and tangled.

Once we had enough images we then needed to edit them in Photoshop. We had been shown how to use the Silver Efex filter.

We opened our images in Raw first, and we could adjust the clarity and also use the sharpening tool if we needed.

Emma showed us how to use selective adjustment tool, and to use the control point to adjust a particular spot on our image. With this you could even produce a vignette.

When it came to editing my images in Photoshop I went to Image > Adjustments > Black and White > Preset > Maximum Black. I also looked at the levels and histogram and adjusted accordingly. To get all the images the same it would be worthwhile creating an action, especially when producing a series of images.