Did I Ever Actually “See” in Black and White?
And could I reteach myself to do it again? And if so, why?
When I began dabbling in photography in the mid-1960s, I shot black and white. Color was prohibitively expensive for both the film and its processing. B&W at least was relatively affordable, and I was so keen I started processing it in my garbage-bag-blacked-out apartment kitchen. There was no way I could process color myself, not then anyway, so I think many photographers of my generation were content with black and white whether we really liked it or not.
I’ve come across a few stories here on Medium in praise of black and white². While I don’t often think about it, if I ever had the ability to “see” in monochrome, I lost it almost the minute I made my first exposure with a digital camera.
We humans generally see in color. Even color-blind people may distinguish some colors. Total color-blindness, achromatopsia, is extremely rare, occurring only in approximately 1 out of 33,000 people¹, mostly men. Seeing in full color in most light is normal; seeing only in shades of gray is not. Seasoned black and white photographers will mentally transmute the colors in a scene to their respective shades of gray before taking the picture. Do that often enough and it becomes natural. Giants such as Ansel Adams, Minor White, Dorothea Lange, and so on and on worked much if not all of their careers in black and white. Stunning black and white. And one or more of them created a word for what they did: previsualization.
Previsualization
From its inception, photography was monochrome. The mere fact of photography gobsmacked the world, but its inventors were soon flailing away to somehow capture the color because it’s a colorful world, and that’s how most people see it. Daguerreotypists almost immediately began using paints, dyes, and washes to at least add some blush to the cheeks of portraits. That continued in various forms to even now.
Still, when I first started playing with a camera, of necessity it was a black and white world. I can’t recall if, at the time, I could “see” in shades of gray. I don’t think I did. I wanted a picture of this or that, so I took it, never giving any thought to the image not being in color; it was what I had. I made the best of it.
I was and remain an ambient-light shooter. In black and white, I could ignore the color temperature of light, mixed light, fluorescent (especially fluorescent) because B&W film didn’t care. Shooting color indoors in iffy light was a royal pain; B&W was no problem.
When I went back to school and took my degree in commercial photography, we didn’t even learn to work in color. We did every assignment in black and white, large format, and usually printed 8x10" cold-tone single-weight glossies for half-tone reproduction because, if we got a job, that’s what we would be doing. Nearly all photojournalism was in monochrome. Very few newsprint publications in the ’60s were printing in 4-color — too expensive all the way around. Knowing how to shoot, process, and print black and white was de rigeur for commercial photographers.
When I had my studio (1978–1995), I derived perhaps half my income from black and white that I foolishly insisted on processing and printing myself. I convinced myself that no one could print the way I could, and even had a few experiences that proved the rule, but it was dumb because I wasn’t being paid to be my own lab rat; I farmed out all the color, why not the monochrome? (Stubborn pride + short-sighted stupidity.)
During the course of sixteen full-time years, I made hundreds, maybe thousands of business headshots like this one, large format, hand-retouched on the negative by me, hand-printed by me. In 20/20 hindsight, I was probably in demand mostly because I was both good and cheap. I never had the guts or the good sense to charge what all this intense, highly skilled handwork was actually worth.
There was even some interest in having a portrait like this hand-tinted with Marshall Oils, still extant and specially formulated for the purpose. A finished work would have looked much like this (this one is thanks to Photoshop). Back in the day, I had to farm these extremely skilled jobs out, which I found a little embarrassing because my predecessor could do the coloring himself, but I couldn’t.
But no matter how much I told myself how I “loved” black and white, the money was in color. The vast majority of portraits and family groups I did were in color. All the weddings were in color. We still felt obliged to shoot weddings with medium format for “quality,” but that was an outdated prejudice against “miniature” 35mm cameras that could do things the bigger cameras couldn’t. The counterargument was that 35mm “couldn’t be enlarged” to wall print size, which was nonsense, but anyway I sold vanishingly few prints larger than 11x14. They wanted albums with 8x10s and 4x5s. We discarded precious flexibility for hypothetical wall prints we never sold.
For my weddings, I shot 100% 400-speed daylight color negative film, indoors and out. Outdoors was no problem because the film was balanced for daylight, but at least half of a wedding is shot indoors. I hated the look of flash-on-camera. My main workaround was to drop my shutter to rashly long times, occasionally 1/15-second (!), relying upon my flash to freeze the action with a 5000°K burst with the run-on shutter getting at least some of the ambient. I wanted a flashed picture to look unflashed. It was stressful, but it worked.
Everything changed for me in August 2007. I made my very first exposure with a digital point-and-shoot and immediately saw that I could now shoot color anywhere, any time, in any light. In that moment, I became (1) a 100% color photographer and (2) a 100% ambient light photographer. Why bother with black and white when I could fearlessly shoot full color? Why worry about flash when I could let my ISO and white balance “float?”
My early cameras were all P&S compacts with onboard peanut flashes that I never used. I had my “secret” workarounds in post that opened shadows without affecting highlights, even when shooting only JPEGs. Once I started shooting raw I was all that, convinced (and even once proving) that I could shoot a wedding with a P&S by ambient light alone. No brag, just fact.
But this story is supposed to be about lacking or at least losing the ability to “see” in monochrome.
It was actually surprising how fast I lost it. I see the world in fabulous, rich, vibrant color; why would I want to go back to black and white? Why indeed would I want to go back to film? If you do, good on ya, but I have zero incentive to backtrack to either.
Still, other authors² here made me stop and consider: am I cheating myself? I used to love monochrome, even thought I was pretty good at it. It can be eye-catching in an otherwise 100% full-color world…
It is possible to set any modern digital camera to shoot black and white, and even to mimic a bunch of renders such as sepia and cyanotype in camera, but except for the ~$9,000 Leica M10 Monochrom, if you shoot B&W in any other digital, you have to shoot JPEG. (I checked my pocket; I got 13¢ and some lint.)
I have been a 100% raw guy for over 6 years; I cannot bring myself to shoot JPEGs, which leaves conversions. The upside is I can change my mind; the downside is that I hardly ever even think of it.
At the time I shot this, I did not see the scene as a potentially successful monochrome. As I say, I don’t see that way anymore. But I have enough experience that even rusty, I hope I know what needs to be done to make a decent conversion, and it's about values—tonal values: the once much-vaunted Zone System of black, white, and shades of gray.
I won’t bore you with a lot of technical foofaraw aside from stating that a good black and white render generally should have a range of about 8-10 distinct tones of gray, from pure no-detail black to pure no-detail white and ~8 or so gradations of gray in between.
I really love color, and I love flowers, and flowers and color seem to be a no-brainer, but for this story, I decided to see if I could manage to make a reasonably okay monochrome of brilliant orange/red flowers backlit in full sun.
I like what I did here. I think it works. I called upon my long experience in the wet chemical darkroom to know what I wanted. Note that attempting a simple one-click conversion to B&W was not successful; doing a convincing render requires thought and manipulations, just like printing in the darkroom.
For me, black and white photos strip down the distractions of color from the subject, exposing something that’s in plain sight but not so obvious. The depth of shadows, the contours of light, and the soul of the subject what the photographer wants to show the world. All this presented on a scale of black, white and grey in the middle. — Aniruddha Pawade
I think that’s the essence of black and white. You don’t have color contrast, which is often subtle, but black and white often needs to be not subtle. Not always, but pretty generally. Instead of color contrast, all you have is — contrast.
I think it’s arguable that the original color shot is sort of monochrome, pink and white. To do the black and white, I really worked it over because a straight conversion was just blah. You are basically working with two tones. I like both versions, but the low-key high contrast B&W is growing on me.
“Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.” — Ansel Adams
Welp, I still don’t know if I can relearn to previsualize in black and white. I am not even convinced that I need to. I have been deliriously happy being able to do everything I want to do in full color regardless that I doubt I will often remember to try an occasional conversion, but I’ll try. Honest.
Thanks so much for reading!
Notes
¹ Coopervision.com
² See also Medium stories on this subject:
