Black and White Photography Today

Black and White Photography Today.

“To see in colour is a delight for the eye, but to see in black and white is a delight for the soul.” -

Andri Hery.

In our modern world, photography is more widely available than at any other time in it's history. Everywhere we go there is a massive proliferation of colour photography. We are constantly bombarded with it. This is only natural as we see in colour. Why then, does black and white persist in this era of digital cameras? With the advent of digital photography and the computer used as the darkroom, the media started to announce that film was dead and that it would become obsolete within a few years. Why wait for the film to be developed and then print the images when, you could have them instantly available on your computer screen?

No smelly chemicals or feeling your way around the darkroom. That was going to be a thing of the past.

Instead of it dying out, black and white film, and indeed colour film, has started to increase in popularity again. Although you can of course create a black and white image from a colour digital file by desaturation, the problem comes with enlargements. For large, so called, fine art photography in both colour and black and white, that is meant to be viewed in a gallery from about 4 feet away pixelation starts to occur when printed from a digital file. (Unless you can afford the Hasselblad H4D-200MS. This produces a 200Mp image but, the cost is approximately £64000 or $100,289 with lens at today's prices.) Therefore by using the relatively cheap option of film and a medium or large format camera, The enlargement can be as big as a house without any grain in the photograph. What some pro photographers are doing is printing out negatives of a black and white digital image on A4 acetate and then have them printed using traditional methods. This helps prevent pixelation and also increases the size to which it can be printed.

Unless I want an exhibition quality photograph I don't print my own. What I do is develop the film then scan into the computer at a high resolution, normally 300dpi. This then gives me an exhibition grade print up to about A2 size.

Why black and white?

By stripping away the dominance of colour you are left to view the pattern, texture, light and shape of the object you photographing. The image is taken right back to its' core essence. 

Figure 1 Crane at St Catherines Dock

 

As can be seen in figure1, the image has shadow, light, texture and form. This was taken with a Pentax K20D, ISO: 100, 1/125^th @ f8, 70mm lens.

When converting a digital file to black and white use desaturation or the channel mixer. This retains the information in the RGB channels at 16bits. What this means is, all the information captured by the sensor is retained and you can manipulate the separate channels with contrast and highlights to achieve the look you are after. Also by using unsharp mask and printing on high gloss paper you improve the acutance and gives the image the snap and sparkle of a high quality darkroom print.

One thing you have to watch out for when converting to black and white is that the subject stands out from the background. As the image is a gradation of shades of grey some colours are very close to each other in the grey scale. In colour, red against green is clear delineation between foreground and background but not in black and white. So, if you are taking a picture to convert grey scale, then use a filter to darken one or the other.

A bit of history

Photography: Black and White

In the Beginning:

Long before the advent of photography, the three things needed to create a photograph were known about. The camera obscura (a dark room with a small hole in one wall to display the scene outside), chemical reaction of light on silver (known about by the Greeks) and lenses. Alas no one had ever thought of combining these three separate items until the late 18^th early 19^th centuries. I won't go in to the chronology of the different discoveries. The first to come up with a photographic process were two Englishmen by the names of Thomas Wedgwood and Humphrey Davy(later Sir). They were followed by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre and William Fox-Talbot. It was William Fox-Talbot's discovery of the negative that led to the birth of modern photography. The main problem with this early photography was the fact that you had to take your darkroom with you.

The cameras were large and heavy and took 10” x 8” glass plates. Exposures were long, from minutes to hours, and had to be developed immediately. In the mid 1800's came an invention that changed all that. The dry plate. These could be exposed and then stored in the dark until you got back to your darkroom to develop them. In 1888 came the biggest game changer of them all. George Eastman invented roll film, bringing photography to the masses. With the roll film came smaller and lighter cameras. When you bought a Kodak camera it came ready loaded with 100 shots. Once exposed you sent the whole thing back to Kodak and waited for your prints to arrive. With these cameras came the explosion of photography as we know it today. Various film formats came and went and finally along came digital. Invented by Kodak.

First Post ever.

I have been thinking, I know, a dangerous habit, to give some of the rookie photographers a bit of practice at composition, set your cameras to one focal length and stick to it for a week. Record a series of photographs at that setting. To compose the image as you would like the it to be, you will have to change positions until you find the right composition. It can be a lot of fun to do. Happy snapping. Nikki.