Shooting black and white

Shooting in monochrome or “black and white” has always been intriguing to me, after all, it was the only available medium for early photography. This means that technically monochrome-style photography shaped what we have today as the earliest works have been documented in a monochrome color pallet. It has always been intriguing to me the emotions that an image can convey when you take out the RGB color space and are left with nothing but what I would call “raw emotion”. In this day and age, I feel that color is viewed as the main component of photography, it induces certain emotions, develops themes, and adapts a sense of style true to every individual photographer, but what happens when we bend this reality that we currently have and take the color out?

Task: Take one of your favorite or just an image that you find visually intriguing and convert it to monochrome.

Ask yourself these three questions

• What emotions are conveyed?

• what story does it tell?

• How is the same image portrayed differently once the color is taken away?

I will provide an example below:

As you can see, these two images can be interpreted and portrayed vastly differently. Understanding the effects of colors on emotion, story, and theme can help you develop and improve your skills as a photographer. You don’t have to go full monochrome but going out and making monochrome images, (yes, this can be done on camera) can be not only a fun exercise but also improve your photography skills.

My experience

In this section of this post, I will bring you through my thorough journey of how, what, and where I came up with this idea to try shooting monochrome.

In June of 2024, my family and I went to Leadville Co., where I ran my first marathon. While we were there I was messing around with my film camera and found myself watching “Willem Verbeeck”, a film photographer who makes videos on YouTube. I found one of his older videos titled “Setting Myself a Film Photography Challenge” where he goes around a desert shooting a black and white medium. He discussed some of the reasons for this challenge/exercise and it was intriguing to me. While I don’t have a 3000 dollar medium format camera to try this out on, I did have a Fujifilm XE1 along where I can mess around with “film recipes” which is essentially just in-body Jpeg manipulation (I will provide the recipe I used at the end). My XE1 with this recipe loaded up made a good companion to my Yashica Electro 35 GSN loaded up with some 35mm portra 400.

I shot my first monochrome image walking around Denver on my trip and instantly fell in love. This image has so many layers, tells so many stories, and converts so many emotions…in my opinion, and contains no color whatsoever! This was so interesting to me and it felt like a breath of fresh air to try something so unique but also weirdly familiar.

So I went on to take more…

And more…

And two more which happen to be my favorites…

Making photos in black and white gave photography a new breath of air and gave me something to be excited about again. No, I will not be switching to monochrome photography, but as a photographer, I believe it is important to keep improving upon your skills as you would in any other hobby or profession. What better way to do this than by understanding color and the way your images portray emotions while getting off your butt and getting into the field to make more art.

Film recipe:

Dynamic Range: DR 100

Film Simulation: MONOCHROME

White Balance: Auto R-1 B2

Color: 0

Sharpness: -1

Highlight Tone: +2

Shadow Tone: +2

Noise Reduction: -2