I recently shared a two-part article on creating bold black and white nature photos with Shuttermonkeys, a new photography education website created by Ian Plant and Zac Mills. You can find an excerpt and link to each part below, with the second article going through my processing steps for the two photos in this post (as a sample of what I cover in the articles, see the before and after GIFs at the end of this post).
Creating Bold Black & White Photographs Part I: In the Field
One of my favorite things about black and white landscape photography is the ability to push the boundaries of reality in a way that can be difficult with color photography. From my perspective, color photography is most powerful when it is grounded in what the photographer actually saw and experienced when creating a photograph. Since viewers know that a black and white scene is by its very nature a departure from reality, the medium offers more latitude for interpreting a scene - a creative freedom that I find exhilarating. With black and white photography, the photographer can emphasize or aggressively introduce drama, boldness, and contrast while still achieving an aesthetically pleasing result – things that are much harder to do when working in color.
In this article, I share four lessons for creating bold and dramatic black and white landscape photographs, focusing on steps that you can take while working in the field. In the second part of this article (below), I will share my basic approach to processing black and white photos along with some lessons on how to emphasize boldness and drama in the digital darkroom. Click here to continue reading Part I >>
Creating Bold Black & White Photographs Part II: Photo Processing
As I discussed in my first article in this series, Creating Bold Black and White Landscape Photographs, one of my favorite aspects of black and white photography is the opportunity to depart from reality, especially in terms of emphasizing boldness, drama, and contrast. For my digital black and white photography, photo processing plays a large role in realizing my vision for each scene. In this article, I will share my general approach to processing digital photos in black and white, go over my favorite processing tools, and share two start-to-finish examples.
While my color photography stays fairly close to the scene as I experienced it, the final result for my black and white photographs often represents a significant departure from the initial RAW file as you will see in the examples below. I do not intend for my black and white photos to be a representation of a reality that you might experience but instead want them to be a dramatic, bold interpretation of nature. Click here to continue reading Part II >>
Before and after examples featured in Part II:
