Friday Photography Tips #12 - The Life Monochrome
For most of us life is in colour. Occasionally dull but often vibrant, it's how we describe our mood, our language and helps us to recall people and places ("you don't remember? You were wearing your blue jumper!").
Yet more often than not, I find myself converting images into black and white. Initially this might have been fuelled by nostalgia, a love of photography from the masters (it's hard to look at the striking portraits by Diane Arbus or Richard Avedon and not think every photograph should be monochrome).
But there are so many reasons why my personal and professional work is often absent of colour, reasons that go beyond inspiration or emulation. Here are some of the important ones that might make you consider making your image monochrome...
1. When There's No Colour to Celebrate
While light is always the most important ingredient in photography, its abundance can have drawbacks. Bright cloudless days typically see colours bleached from a scene, relegating the beautiful deep palette that should be there to a light and faded one. This can be combatted with the help of filters or using 'dehaze' in post-processing; but typically I prefer instead to use the hard light offered by a midday sun as an opportunity to take high contrast images and celebrate the shapes or shadows the day has to offer.
The same can be said for indoor portraiture, when the artificial light mutes the colours in the room and makes the scene less inspiring, a monochrome image can feel like it has more contrast.
2. Remove Distraction
Vibrant colours can sometimes become a distraction, working against the subject of a photograph. In portraiture it's all too often to find yourself photographing someone whose t-shirt has a small yet significantly bright colour that your eye will be naturally led to. In the image above, the film collection in the background becomes much more distracting when the different coloured boxes are visible.
By removing colour completely from the equation, the viewer will be drawn to the area in focus and need to study the scene carefully to understand it. I think these images like this tend to have an emotional connection.
3. Texture You Can Almost Feel
Contrast in black and white photographs creates images that you can almost feel as you look at them. Every pore and crevice of a landscape or a face comes to life.
The beauty of modern (mirrorless) cameras is that I can now choose to look at the world in black and white through my viewfinder, as I'm taking a photograph. This is something I will explore more in a future video.
Happy Monochrome Friday,
Tom
