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Like many photographers who learned the craft shooting tri-x, making the transition to shooting digital, and especially shooting digital black and white, has not been easy for me. Aside from the look and feel issues, digital seems to clean to me, many of the technological advances of the digital camera, the previewing in color, and the ability to convert images easily into black and white, work against the zen-like focus needed for black and white. I recently was shown a trick by a young photographer that has helped me considerably and I thought I would share it with those who are interested. As a caveat, those you you interested in landscape photography, or use of extensive filtration techniques in post-processing, probably needn’t read any further.
Go to your menu settings under “parameters” and select the option for black and white– this doesn’t effect your RAW output, only the previews and the jpeg output, if your camera is set for that. Now its easier to get into thinking, or visualizing in b/w. I don’t advocate chimping, or continuously checking the previews, but I do look to make sure the exposures (underexposed, preferably, for b/w) are correct, and its impossible not to start to make some decisions based in the content. Seeing the previews in b/w is a good way to get started in the right direction of thinking in black and white.
Now comes the huge leap of faith. Set the camera to create largest jpeg that you can, without RAW output.
Yes, I know that we have been told that RAW is the way to go. And no doubt that if you need to do some heavy toning it is. But by setting the camera to jpeg and taking a leap of faith–your pictures will now be in b/w and to color they can never return- when you import the capture capture into Lightroom, Aperture, or wherever you like, the images will be in b.w. This will give you a complete black and white workflow, and more importantly a b/w mindset, focusing more on your content, emotion and the personality of the people in your pictures, and worry less about the confluence or conflict of colors.
I wouldn’t underestimate the in camera jpegs also. Only a very small percentage of digital camera users shoot RAW. A lot of research and development goes into the look and feel of the JPEG, which is the format that 99.9% of digital camera users output. Next time you want to shoot black and white, try using these settings– it is habit forming, and as close as I can come to shooting black and white film using a digital camera. Let me know how it works out or post some images to Dis’ n Dat. This months theme is “Got Money?” as in the song by New Orleans rapper Lil Wayne.