So here’s the question. Should you use a regular digital camera for black and white photography, or would it be better to get one of the few dedicated monochrome cameras with a black and white sensor? These are relatively uncommon and highly specialized cameras that do offer some advantages for high end monochromatic photography, but a mono camera is far from essential. So what else should you look for?
I’ve had a fascination with the Leica ‘look’ ever since I first went on a shoot with a digital Leica M rangefinder. The contrast and colors were exceptionally intense, the M-series lenses added a subtle vignette at wider apertures and there was an intriguing shift in the color palette compared to the clinical accuracy of other cameras.
Is there a particular skill in shooting black and white images? There is, but it’s quite elusive and not immediately instinctive. After all, our eyes see in color, and there’s not a whole lot we can do about that. We can learn to ‘see’ black and white eventually, but it’s here that modern digital cameras can offer an invaluable head start.
That’s a good question. I had a friend at school who couldn’t see the point in watching a black and white movie because the world was in color. I tried to explain that black and white made things look different, it changed the mood, it brought lighting and drama to the fore… and so on. He wouldn’t have it. To his mind, black and white contains less information than color and that made it, by definition, inferior.
In this article I want to explain the difference between what I’ll call ‘image browsers’ and ‘image cataloguers’. Image cataloguing tools like Adobe Lightroom import your photos into a database and offer very sophisticated, very adaptable organizing and search options. But they bring their own limitations and complications. What’s the alternative?
It sounds nigh-on impossible, but Lightroom’s new AI powered Remove option really can wipe away reflections in glass as if they had never existed. This is something which would be very, very difficult to achieve using regular editing tools. I’ve tried it out on a number of different images and been impressed by just how effective it is.
This post was written soon after the new Distraction tools were added to Lightroom, so some of the issues I talk about may have been solved by the time you read this. This post is for anyone struggling to get the early version working…
Lightroom’s Enhance feature used to create a new (larger) DNG file alongside the original RAW file, but now it doesn’t! That’s huge news for anyone who uses Adobe’s AI denoising tool regularly. Here’s how the new setup works.
So what?, you’re thinking. Why do we need another generic Adobe profile when we can choose one that matches the camera’s own rendition and picture styles, or choose one of Adobe’s many built in black and white, creative, modern or vintage profiles? Well let’s see…
Minimalism, brutalism and architecture, three of my favourite things. So when I got the chance to spend a week in a converted WWII bunker, I spent much of my time exploring the objects, compositions and lighting in this strange but extraordinary environment.