Nature Photography Photo Workshop

8.1. SEEING IN BLACK AND WHITE

When you look at a scene in real life, color most often dominates your perception. Thus, the first step in black-and-white photography is seeing past the color. The process begins by evaluating the subject matter and making composition decisions based on what the photo could look like when it's converted to black and white later during post-processing.

8.1.1. TONAL PERCEPTION

Most scenes in nature contain a wide range of tones from near- or pure white highlights to solid black shadows with many levels of brightness in between. Always evaluate tone and color separately. To make strong black-and-white nature photographs, you need to mentally break apart the tonal components from the color components in the scene. Think purely in terms of light and dark and the tones in between.

There are some common references you can use. Using the example from previous chapters, green grass is close to midgray, meaning about halfway between black and white on the tone scale. With practice, you can learn to recognize the color of objects under different kinds of light and determine what their tonal values would be if they were converted to gray levels without any adjustment to their inherent brightness (see 8-2).

Figure 8-2. ABOUT THIS PHOTO Close-up image of tree bark shows grayscale tone levels after conversion from color to black and white (ISO 100, f/16, 1/20 sec. with a Tamron 18-200mm XR Di II lens). Converted to black and white in Lightroom.

It's especially ...