Seeing In Black & White

Yesterday’s workshop was all about trying to imagine a scene in black and white before we captured it on camera. Trying to imagine how something would look in black and white is much harder than it looks and things I first thought would look amazing ended up looking very flat and boring once captured.

To take these photographs I used my Nikon D5300 camera with the standard 18-55mm Kit Lens. I chose to take the photos in RAW and JPEG; taking the JPEG photographs in monochrome so I could instantly see how the RAW images would look after I converted them to black and white.

Whilst taking my photographs around the campus I had to keep in mind that whatever I was photographing needed to be high in contrast. I also needed to think about how busy the scene was as you can loose a lot of detail when converting images to black and white.

Once I had taken my photos and chosen the best 9 I opened them in Photoshop. Instead of converting them into black and white in Photoshop I opened a program called silver Efex Pro 2 and applied Preset #24 ‘full contrast and structure’ to my first image. This increased the contrast and made the smaller details in the photograph much more visible. As I was going to be making a set of images and I wanted them all to look similar I saved this preset as a custom preset to apply to my other images. I then imported them all into Lightroom to save them in the style of a contact sheet.

I found this short workshop incredibly helpful as I rarely work with black and white photography. It was also useful to learn how to use a new programme which I’m sure I will use again in the future.

I am very pleased with my set of images however I do not feel as though they work all that well together. A few of the images, such as the top right corner image, the bottom left and the bottmom centre image are all macro shots which don't really fit together with the other photographs. They are also a lot darker than the others.

Next time I decide to take photographs with the intension of converting them to black and white I believe it will be easier for me to imagine how they will look before I take them. I would also like to invest in a new Lens as I don’t feel like my current Lens is as versatile as it needed to be for something like this. 

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