Shooting Black & White Film
Shot at F4 1/80s 50mm on Kentmere Pan 400 (Nikon F100)
Black and white (B&W) photography was not something I had ever properly pursued. Shooting RAW files on digital, I had always taken pictures in colour and did what many people view the purpose of B&W to be – a crutch to hold up bad images. If an image did not work in colour then perhaps it would work better in B&W, sometimes this held true but generally you are taking an average looking colour image and turning it to Monochrome. Unsurprisingly it does not then stop being an average image no matter how much you try to fool yourself.
Shot at F11 1/60 80mm on Ilford XP2 (Bronica SQ-A). Certainly a suitable subject for monochrome but in flat lighting and without filters it lacks that much needed punch.
Shooting film gave me the opportunity to truly, consciously shoot in B&W, by loading up rolls of Ilford there was no way I could hide behind the colour information of a digital RAW file. I had to be able to look at a scene and re-interpret the colour image I saw with my own eyes through the viewfinder to understand if it worked well in Monochrome. Shape, form, detail, contrast and good on a dull day are some of the most common things I had heard and so my starting point was going out to shoot old buildings on a cloudy morning to gage what I was doing. Shooting in flat lighting with little understanding of the film’s (Ilford XP2) properties, my first results come out very bland and unexciting. Back to my previous point – an average image does not stop being an average image just because it is in B&W.
Colour filters are used to change and enhance contrast in black and white images (in this case an Orange filter) by only letting in a certain type of light. Exposures must be increased by the filter factor to compensate for the light loss.
Going back to the drawing board I did some research to see if I had missed something in my approach. Low and behold I found out that those shooting B&W will often use colour filters to create different effects and make their images look less muddied, more dramatic, and eye-catching. To the uninitiated this may sound a bit odd, why use colour filters when you are not shooting in colour? Well colour does still matter in B&W photography because different colours are perceived to be brighter or darker than others and so that is what creates the contrast between light and dark. Using colour filters, you can manipulate the amount of contrast to get your desired results, as I will now demonstrate by showing examples using a Red and Green.
Shot at F11 1/125s 80mm (Bronica SQ-A) - no filters.
Shot at F11 1/15s 80mm (Bronica SQ-A) - Red filter. The exposure had to be increased by 3 stops in order to compensate for the light loss, notice how the vegetation in the foreground is darker than in the shot without a filter. The sky would also have been noticeably darker if it had been more blue that day.
Shot at F11 1/5s 100mm (Nikon F100) - Orange filter. The exposure needed to be increased by 2 stops to compensate for the light loss.
Shot at F11 1/4s 100mm (Nikon F100) - Green Filter. Exposure needed to be increased by 1 1/2 stops to compensate for the light loss. Notice how the Green filter has lifted the shadows compared to the Orange filter. Patches in the water which were green vegetation are also noticeably brighter.
The other most used filter are Yellow (which requires only 1 stop of exposure compensation and is often used in portrait work to complement skin tones) and the wild card filter that sits alongside Green is the Blue filter; however, I do not own one of those. As this filter reduces contrast by lifting shadows and increasing the brightness of the sky, it does not see as much use as the traditional Yellow/Orange/Red. It is something to be used only in a very particular situation.
B&W photography is still something that is very new to me and I have a lot to learn and experiment with until I can say I am confident in shooting it. It will help my creativity and understanding of light as I now must really think and look past the colour image I see in everyday life. Looking more closely at the interplay between light and dark, texture and contrast. Many of the autumn scenes I had been shooting on colour film would not have worked at all as the similar tonal ranges would have simply looked muddied and flat. So, in some ways being in the middle of winter, when there is little colour outside, is a rather good time to start this. An important lesson I have learned though is that the dramatic light of sunrise and sunset are still the best times to shoot even without colour. It is not something to be rolled out only on dull mid-afternoons.
Shot at F4 1/100s 50mm (Nikon F100). No matter whether you shoot in colour or black and white, the dramatic light at the start or end of the day will always produce more visual interest than the flatter lighting found during the middle of the day.
Of course, B&W photography is not just for film shooters and as I have recently learned you can change your digital cameras display (either on the rear screen, or through the viewfinder for mirrorless cameras) so you can look at your subject in monochrome but still shoot RAW files for maximum quality. For now, though I have quite a stack of film in the fridge so I should use them all up first before I reach for the digital camera again.
It has opened my eyes up to new creative possibilities and something I no longer neglect as simply a crutch for bad photography, I will write a follow-up blog once I have shot the next set of rolls.
What do you think? Do you shoot in B&W? If not do you think you will now give it a go? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
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