Experimenting With Black and White

When do you choose to shoot in black and white? Do you ever? The past couple of weeks I’ve been making an effort to try out shooting/editing in black and white, and I think I’m starting to understand when I like it. Watching a few YouTube videos gave me some ideas on when it could be a good idea to swap to black and white. In this blog I’ll post some side by sides of particular photos I think work better in black and white along with my reasoning.

Here is a photo taken at a local plant swap meetup cropped in a bit with the Fuji 50mm f2. I was sitting inside a greenhouse and had some strong light flooding inside at the far end. Two people were standing at the table to the right and I took a shot exposing only for the highlight, attempting to cast everything else to shadow. In this photo I want the two silhouettes of the people to be the focal point. With all the plants hanging around in the shot though it is still pretty detail heavy, but stick with me here I’m new okay! Anyway, now let me show you the color version.

Here my eye tends to fall towards the prominent greens being cast in the highlight rather than the two people. I wouldn’t say it’s drastically different in terms of the focus, but after toggling back and forth I prefer the black and white version. In this video by Roman Fox, he discusses an example of when it could be beneficial to switch to black and white that helped me. Is the subject of the photo the color? In this case no because I want my eye to fall towards the shadowed out silhouettes and not the greens. Let’s look at another photo.

I won’t rehash what I mentioned above, but I’m trying to do the same thing here by choosing black and white. Removing distraction. In this case I felt the extra random color in the scene took my eye away from the man walking on the left, and felt a bit less focused.

My eye wants to roam to the orange traffic barrier first, then the (honestly more in focus) trash can and post on the right. In the black and white version, I feel there’s a bit more contrast between him and the background elements. As with many things it does come down to personal taste and whatever style you’re going for. For me, I hadn’t put much thought into shooting black and white because I was stumped by it more or less. The idea of using it to remove distraction when color is not the focus has given me some inspiration to experiment with it more. Here are some more black and white photos I’ve done recently, some snapshots and some more intentionally composed.