Inspiration

One of my good friends, takes photos almost exclusively in black and white and with monochrome only cameras. He's totally sold on the monochrome world, see’s everything in black and white and is pretty good at it too.

For most people, limiting yourself in this way is a step too far out of the comfort zone. As I've learned however, avoiding conversions from colour images allows me to embrace the simplicity of monochrome and inspires me to create more powerful and engaging images.

Monochrome forces you to think about light and use it to create a mood or feel to your photos. Even in post processing, I find myself thinking about the light distribution around the image and what would make it better. This puts more of me into every image I take which is effectively what developing your own style is all about. Some photographers do this to great effect and produce instantly recognisable images.

Tom with his monochrome camera in London

Where to start with monochrome photography

I wanted to immerse myself in the end-to-end monochrome process to see what it could do for my photography but wasn’t wanting to rush straight into buying a monochrome camera.

Instead, I chose black and white film as my starting point to learn the art and I’m so glad I did. All those digital film simulations I’d been looking at started to make sense and by exploring many different, actual films, I started to identify some favourites and get an idea of what might work best in my photos.

When shooting film, you not only have tones and contrast to deal with but grain also. This all adds up to character and texture in your images that can be used to good effect to create a look and feel that matches the scene being photographed.

Shooting black and white film is relatively inexpensive and is the easiest type of film to develop and process at home. I was doing this after just a couple of months and quickly experimenting with the developing process to get different results.

By subtle tweaking of the development process like increased agitation in the developer you can enhance contrast and by pushing film a stop or two you can go even further.

Doing film processing yourself rather than using a lab, brings down the cost, and makes you think about the process required to create good monochrome images. I think that it’s by far the best way to immerse yourself in the monochrome end-to-end process and it can be highly rewarding if you’re prepared to try different things, which might ruin a few images when it doesn’t work out.

Shooting lots of film I quickly discovered bulk loading and rolling my own films. This meant I could bring down the cost further and experiment more by rolling short films of say 6-12 exposures just to test different developing processes quickly. You don’t tend experiment so much when buying film at full price in case you ruin a whole roll.

A 100ft (30.5m) bulk roll of film is cost effective and can be rolled into 18 x 36 exposure cannisters. You can make it go a lot further if you reduce the number of frames to 20 which is what I usually do. This helps ensure I always finish a roll of film when I go out with the camera. Even shorter rolls allow testing of new kit, or chemistry before you apply it to your main photography.

Chasing the light

With monochrome photography, you are simply capturing light and dark. A full range image consists of the darkest shadows (black) to the brightest highlights (white) and everything in between (grey).  

Shooting monochrome, you’ll start to see the world in black and white and learn about the interplay between light and dark. Concentrating on this in your composition will help to create some of the most engaging images without having to worry about distractions. You will learn to zero into your subject and set out in your mind’s eye how you want the final image to look.

Grain & Digital Noise

What I enjoyed the most about my film project was learning about how different films look, understanding what film character works best in my photos and learning what you must do differently when you shoot in monochrome.

The first thing you notice shooting film is that images aren't near as sharp as digital. At first you can think you're doing something wrong. I spent a good deal of time getting my digital scans to a level where sharpness was as good as it could be.

What's undeniable though is the character added to an image by the introduction of grain. Some people prefer a harsh and noisy looking grain, the more the better. Personally, I prefer fine grain with high contrast and sharper images.

Digital noise is very different from film grain, but it is possible to produce a convincing image by increasing or adding digital noise to a photo in post processing.

By using higher ISOs on your digital camera and turning up shutter speeds you can increase noise, but it can be quite messy as you have both luminance and colour noise to contend with, which can be quite random. It's almost better to shoot a clean image and add digital noise later in post processing.

Colour noise typically manifests as clumps of coloured pixels or ‘artefacts’ in your image. In monochrome images, this turns into luminance noise which is lighter pixels or white spots in the dark areas.

There is an exception when using a monochrome digital camera. You only get luminance noise which is not dissimilar to fine film grain. Because there are no colour channels, the noise is like extremely fine grain. I've likened digital noise from these cameras to the finest film grain of some of my favourite films.

Metering for monochrome images

In photography, you’ll often hear people talking about metering for highlights or shadows. Others will just use automatic metering, either matrix, centre-weighted or spot and still get good results. It’s easy with digital photography because you can see the results while you work and adjust accordingly.

Monochrome photography enjoys the reductive simplicity we talked about earlier, but to do it well involves a more advanced understanding of the light and how your camera responds to it. This needs to be optimised depending on the type of image you’re looking to create but also on the final media, digital or film.

Monochrome digital cameras are more sensitive and because they only have 1 channel of light and dark, it’s easy to blow the highlights out. Film on the other hand can be much better at controlling over-exposure but not so good for recovering detail in under-exposed shadows.

You can extract an incredible amount of detail from under-exposed shadows in digital monochrome images, which can be up to 7 stops on some cameras. It therefore is worth protecting the highlights, unless you are looking to blow them in parts of the image for effect which is another advanced technique.

Film has much more latitude in the highlights and on some films like Neopan Acros II, it’s almost impossible to over-expose them. Other films like Rollei Retro 80S, have incredible sharpness but it’s very easy to blow highlights and like a digital monochrome can benefit from a little underexposure.

Generally, recovering shadow detail in under-exposed film is quite difficult, so you might want to meter for the shadows here once you understand how highlights are treated.

If your image is going to be high contrast and moody, you might be bothered about underexposed, shadows devoid of detail. This works incredibly well for some images, and advanced photography is all about breaking the rules of standard composition.

Another term often used, and more so in monochrome photography, is ‘negative space’. This is where you have a wide area of the frame in total darkness, or total highlight and one small detail, or leading line. Imagine a white screen, with a silhouette of a man in one corner, or a diagonal line throught the image with a train coming into view but everything below in complete darkness. You get the idea.