The Black and White Esthetic

Maybe it’s because I’ve been enjoying looking at all the great black and white prints I’ve produced over the years. Maybe it’s because I’ve produced so many thousands of color images since the dawn of the digital age. Or maybe it’s because some images simply look better to me in black and white. Whatever the reason, I find myself converting a lot more color into B&W these days.

Anyone who’s tried this knows (or should know) there’s more to it than simply clicking the B&W button in Photoshop, Lightroom, or Aperture. If you want your B&W images to really sing then you’ve got to develop a feel for contrast and tonal separation. This encompasses not just which tones should be light and which should be dark, but how light, how dark, and where. Are you going for drama, or are you going for delicacy? Are you trying to make your images look as if they were shot with B&W film (ironic, yes?) or are you trying to enhance their “digitality?” These are the types of questions you might want to think about if you don’t already have the answers.

For me, this B&W phase is most likely the prelude to producing a photobook of my work. I know it’s possible to produce press-printed books that rival the quality of the best silver-based or inkjet prints. I know because I own a few of such books myself. What I’m wondering is how close I can come with today’s print-on-demand publishers. If any of you has first hand experience with a POD publisher who does excellent black-and-white printing, please let me and the rest of us know who that might be.

In the meantime, here are a few examples of why I’m so into B&W these days. Here's a tip: Typepad doesn't do them justice. They will all look a lot better if you click on them to open them in a separate browser window.

 

Comments

[Tim]

Agree entirely - every day I shoot something and convert to black&white - most often using a particular film's colour-sensitivities but we do not have our heads up our posteriors about film-v-digital, if it looks good... :)

(For a fun experiment, paste the table from http://www.darktable.org/usermanual/ch03s04s36.html.php into a spreadsheet and plot a bar-graph of R/G/B biases of black&white films - quite interesting.)

I particularly like your `Texture Mix'. Yes.. yes it is that.

[Steve Rosenbach]

Gordon - Dave Beckerman, a few years back, tried several POD products, and found that MyPublisher.com was the best for his B&W work.

I've used MyPublisher, and I found their quality to be excellent, although all the photos were color, not B&W. But I definitely recommend that you try a "beta test" of, say, one 20 or so pages in their standard size.

best regards,
SteveR