Introduction to the First Edition

As photographers, we are confronted each and every day with a wide array of choices. Most of us have the experience of being paralyzed with indecision when confronted with all the choices about what can be photographed.

Besides your choice of subject, you can worry about how your photograph is going to be lit (if you are using artificial light), or what time of day the lighting is best (if you are relying on natural light). Then there’s the choice of lens, focal length, f-stop, shutter speed, ISO, and so on—not to mention the choices about how you will process and present your photo after it has been shot.

Bewilderment in the face of so many artistic choices can lead to creative blocks, and is sometimes called horror vacui—or fear of “empty spaces” on the canvas of life that presents itself to every photographer. One response is to intentionally limit one’s artistic palette so there are not so many choices. A natural self-limitation in photography is to leave out the color and present the world in black and white.

Limiting photography to black and white is an obvious strategy because of the history of photography. For a substantial part of the history of photography, the only choice was monochrome—and people thought of photography as being black and white. Color was only introduced to photography in the mid-twentieth century, and people have had a hard time accepting color work as part of the accepted canon of photographic art.

As I’ll show you in Creative Black & White: Digital Photography Tips & Techniques, many things are different with the rise of digital technology. Presenting a photo in black and white is not a consequence of the materials used; rather, it is an intentional aesthetic choice. Furthermore, from a technical perspective it almost always makes sense to shoot and initially process a digital photo in color—even if you plan from the very beginning to present it in black and white.

Black and white photography is redolent with echoes from the history of photography, and it is wise to keep this in mind as you make your own black and white images. The absence of color in a black and white print or online image can strongly imply the color that isn’t present—but only imagined. Black and white photography must play strongly to the imagination of the viewer. This often means taking advantage of the power of the graphic design that can occur when an image is composed only in monochrome.

My goal in Creative Black & White is to be your companion and guide as you create your own black and white imagery. Together we’ll experience what it means to think in black and white. I’ll show you many of the visual ideas that can work well with black and white, and share my expertise about the technical approaches that can be used to create high-quality digital black and white photos.

I have a great passion for black and white photography, and I look forward to sharing my joy in the art and craft of digital monochromatic image creation with you!

Circumflex—The idea for this photo was to isolate the typewriter key used to type French accents, because it looks like a little funny face. To achieve this goal I kept the circumflex (^) key sharp, while letting everything else in the image go out of focus.

I wanted to present the photo with an antique look, so once I’d processed the black and white version, I added a sepia tone layer with reduced opacity (see page 199 for more information about this technique).

Nikon D300, 200mm macro, 1.3 seconds at f/4.5 and ISO 100, tripod mounted, processed in Photoshop with a sepia overlay.