Past, Present, and Future

In large part, when we think of great photography prior to the digital era, we think of black and white imagery.

Gritty stills of the Second World War. Magnificent Ansel Adams landscapes of the American West. Classical compositions of nudes, peppers and shells by Edward Weston. All these and more are part of the shared black and white collective consciousness.

Sure, once color film came along folks started filling up those yellow Kodak boxes with slides. But until fairly recently color photos have not been recognized as art.

Back in the days of film, you could shoot in color or in black and white. A vast gulf separated the two. Amateurs, and some advertising photographers, shot color. Art photographers worked in monochrome.

An oversimplification, of course. But the fact remains that if you had a 35mm film camera, you had to decide what kind of film cartridge to load, and whether it should be color or black and white.

With the domination of digital technology in photography, the choice of color versus black and white no longer belongs to the physical domain (leaving aside one expensive specialty camera, the Leica Monochrom M which only captures in black and white). A good strategy is to shoot full color whether you intend to present your final image in color—or to make an outstanding black and white image. I’ll tell you more about the best practices in creating Black and White in the Digital Era, starting on page 84.

The implication is that the choice to create black and white imagery is virtual. In other words, it is an aesthetic choice, similar in nature to presenting work that is only blue in tint, that uses a specific focal length or lens, or is limited to a certain kind of subject matter and so on. The choice of black and white does not have to be made until “after the fact”—because the photo has already been taken—although the best black and white imagery is often intentionally created with monochrome in mind.

In other words, your photos of a given scene can be presented in both color and black and white. Or you can decide to present your work in monochrome after you see how your shoot has turned out. There’s nothing wrong with these approaches. But since black and white is an affirmative choice—amounting to the intentional abnegation of color—it works best to make this choice with intentionality.

Whichever way you choose to work, learning to think in black and white is an important part of the job.

When photographing the wonderful spirals of a Chambered Nautilus shell, it’s hard not to think of the classical black and white imagery of Edward Weston. With this fairly straightforward macro photograph of the shell, I was able to use the color information I captured to create a really rich monochromatic image with great tonal range.

Nikon D300, 50mm macro, 8 seconds at f/32 and ISO 100, tripod mounted; converted to monochrome using Photoshop Adjustment layers.