A Month of Monochrome: First Impressions

A lit­tle over two weeks ago, I declared that for all my per­sonal work, I would shoot in black and white exclu­sively. So far, I’ve kept to it, for the most part. I have over a month to go, but have already taken a num­ber of pho­tos in var­i­ous types of mono­chrome. So far, I’ll be honest–it’s been harder than I expected.

I have always loved black and white, have always loved look­ing for the tex­tures, angles, lines and con­trasts in images that make them work with­out color. But I also see in color, often take pho­tos that con­trast color rather than tone, or where color is the cen­tral player. That bowl of fresh blue­ber­ries just doesn’t trans­late well to sepia tones.

But I am also learn­ing things about how I see, inter­pret, and com­pose the world. Tak­ing the color out of pho­tos makes me focus on other ele­ments that make them work or fail. Some­thing that is well defined by its color in a color image may be lost in clut­ter in black and white, so I must focus on sim­plic­ity and form in my image. Depth of field always plays a role in pho­tog­ra­phy of any sort, but in black and white it’s sub­tly dif­fer­ent than with color.

It is inter­est­ing to see how tones of black and gray can set the mood in a photo–can take some­thing inno­cent and make it sin­is­ter, or take some­thing com­mon­place and give it depth. That is not to say that con­vert­ing an image to black and white makes it some­how “bet­ter.” Indeed, I have had sev­eral pho­tos that work rea­son­ably well in color, but utterly fail in black and white, for var­i­ous rea­sons. But good images, images that were con­ceived in black and white, or that just work that way by happy coin­ci­dence, gain some­thing when they lose their palette.

I con­tinue to love black and white for portraits–there is some­thing time­less, focused, and beau­ti­ful about ren­der­ing skin in tones of gray. It can empha­size the beauty of good light and good skin, some­times hide imper­fect skin, and can some­times mit­i­gate the effect of bad (read: yucky color tem­per­a­ture) light.

I love the abil­ity to empha­size con­trast and pat­tern, to paint bold strokes of dark and light, to push con­trast far out past the lim­its with color. I like the empha­sis on forms, edges, and tex­tures. For some things it works bril­liantly, for oth­ers the color is a nec­es­sary ele­ment to artic­u­late a photo, to make it make any sense.

What I’ve learned so far is that you have to shoot dif­fer­ently to make images work in black and white. Imag­ine being a pho­tog­ra­pher using one of the first widely avail­able color films, and how that must have changed your pho­tog­ra­phy. We have an incred­i­ble lux­ury with dig­i­tal cam­eras to choose color or black and white on the fly, or even after the fact. We have cre­ative free­dom to pick and choose what we leave in color and what we con­vert to mono­chrome. We are not forced always to shoot in a man­ner dic­tated by the par­tic­u­lar medium (at least, not in terms of color vs. black and white).

When you then take away that option as I have, you feel the con­straint. Like shoot­ing with a sin­gle focal length or a sin­gle lens, you are forc­ing your­self to approach things dif­fer­ently. A lot of peo­ple argue that primes are bet­ter than zooms because they force you to move and think about your fram­ing more, but I think the real rea­son primes are often use­ful is because they make you fil­ter your shots more. Just as with black and white, they make you think about fram­ing and per­spec­tive, and force you to fig­ure out how to get the per­spec­tive you want, or fil­ter and focus your shoot­ing so that you find things that work. It is a par­tic­u­lar way of see­ing.

Shoot­ing black and white is essen­tially the same in that it forces this choosi­ness, though it’ a lit­tle harder to see while out shoot­ing. I have found, though, that after each round of photo-editing, I am get­ting bet­ter at fig­ur­ing out which shots will look good in black and white, and which ones won’t work. I have always tried to “see” in black and white, but I feel like I am now start­ing to hone and fine-tune that ability.

Of course, there will always be pho­tos that fea­ture color as the cen­tral motif. Would the image of the Afghan Girl have become iconic if it had been in black and white? Would Ansel Adams’ “Tetons and the Snake River” have looked as dra­matic in color? Who knows? The pho­tog­ra­phers might have approached them in com­pletely dif­fer­ent ways had they had a dif­fer­ent type of film loaded in their cam­eras. They might have made other iconic images.

My take­away so far, then, is that shoot­ing in black and white has rein­forced my con­vic­tion that we are liv­ing in a great era of pho­tog­ra­phy, where we have a wide vari­ety of media and tools within our grasp. We are free to exper­i­ment and to dream, whether that means con­vert­ing a van into a cam­era and trav­el­ing back to the roots of pho­tog­ra­phy, or work­ing fully in the dig­i­tal realm, pulling stills out of high res­o­lu­tion mov­ing pic­tures. What you do with the tools is up to you, and that choice is what makes it so magical.