New technology in photography is opening up new choices for wedding, portrait and corporate photographers. These days, photographers don’t set their camera to capture black and white photographs, although you can if you wish. It makes no sense to do it that way. All images captured by serious photographers can be tweaked using software packages. This not only means adjusting the skin tones and giving clouds their definition back (as examples), but also allows for the removing of the colour of an image if desired. Back in the film days, you would have to decide if an image would be better in colour or black and white and then purchase the appropriate film stock. It was expensive and risky.
I bought a book recently by Helmut Newton. Every image is black and white and to me, every image is enhanced by this – I really love Newton’s work though! He captured and lit his subjects with this technique in mind.
I really like black and white images, but I don’t like every image from a wedding (for example) to be in this style. If the mother of a bride has a bright red dress on – let it be shown I say. If a grandfather has beautiful blue eyes in a portrait session, I am going to want to show them off. Colour is really important. But, when it comes to projecting or enhancing a look or an emotion quickly – black and white might just be the way to go. I think black and white is great for portrait images in a lot of cases.
As an example of my work process, after I photograph a wedding, I post the photos I have treated into a preview gallery for the bride and groom to view. It’s at this point that they are free ask to have images changed to black and white. There is a real art to doing this. It’s not just removing colour, it’s the adjustments within the colour information that the software allows photographers to fiddle with.
Here are some examples of a colour photograph that I changed to black and white. The first image is my final treatment – the second image has simply had the colour removed. The photo is of my son Joe.
Photo 1 – I adjusted certain gamma settings to make it BLACK and white – not GREY and white – his eyes are enhanced and almost piercing, purely by removing the colour information, adjusting the contrast, as well as tweaking the gamma range.
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Photo 2 – I have simply removed the colour information. There is a big difference.
