Black and White photography

Playing with light, shadows and shades

Light plays an essential role in the composition of a great shot. The amount and strength of it, the way it illuminates a subject, the shadows it creates..... You can learn a lot about light by taking pictures in black and white, or converting your shots to black and white by desaturating the colors.

In a colored image it is difficult to see the effect of difference shades of light, because we generally don't 'see' which colors are intrinsically dark or light. Only when we translate colors into greyscale can we really 'see' the difference.

For my first Black and White exploration I went to the market and took some shots with my iPhone and converted them to black and white in iPhoto.

Red tomatoes in a bue box, yellow cheeses with red and blue bands, golden brown and yellow breadrolls a with white flour dusting. 

The red and blue translate into a dark, almost charcoal grey, that is much lighter where the actual sunlight illuminates the scene. 

The shiny looking yellow of the cheeses become a dull silvery grey, the bright looking red band provides much less contrast in the B&W version, the bread rolls have a lot more contrast in the B&W version than in the colored one. Fascinating!

The orange-pink heads of the fishes looks quite dark in the B&W version and melt together with the grey scales of the skins, thereby providing a greater contrast with the white ice.  The light pink roses that seem to be rather uniform in size and shape, get a lot more depth and difference in B&W. 

The most amazing translation takes place in the middle image, where the salmon colored headscarf becomes almost white, as well as the turquoise square of the scarf in the middle.

I was amazed at the effect of the B&W conversion, and decided to try it again with the colors of nature. Here too the results were stunning.

The dried hogweed seems very light in the B&W version and the background is a rather dark mass without much detail. In the colored version the background is a more layered gradient with the hogweed just slightly popping up in front.

The image with the tree is interesting, because in the colored version you can easily discern between the green grass, the blue water and the brown bushes in the background, they are clearly defined shapes, while in the B&W version they melt together into a big dark grey shape set against the light cloudy sky.
In the last image the fresh green leaves of the butterbur and the light blue water in the background convert to one single splash of light spreading out toward the front of the frame.

In the colored shot the eye is drawn towards the bright yellow parts of the oak leaves, but in the B&W version the dark parts (brown and saturated green) are more compelling, while the yellow converts to the same light white-grey as the orange brown leaf on the bottom left. In the middle picture the light falling on the dog's face and the woman's shoulder is much more eye-catching in the B&W version, while the details of the woman's clothes disappear completely.

The last shot is mostly filled with different shades of green, so the difference between light and dark parts is easier to 'see'. Conversion to black and white therefore has the least dramatic effect.

To be able to really grasp the way colors and hues translate into grayscale images I shot some   roses in varying bright colors and with different saturation levels. 

Here the translation of the lightness of each color is also clearly visible. The darkest parts of the red rose are almost black, while the lighter parts verge more toward charcoal. The lightest parts op the salmon colored rose are almost white, while the darkest parts verge towards the same charcoal as the lightest parts of the red rose.... really amazing!