I love the beauty and simplicity of black-and-white photography, and there's little process simpler than setting a camera to your preferred black-and-white mode and running wild with straight-of-the-camera JPEG files. But not all black-and-white picture profiles are equal, so which is the best?
The early days of photography were built on monochromatic imagery. Many of the greats who created what we now know as the art of photography worked primarily with black-and-white film.
Sir Roger A. Deakins is widely considered to be one of the greatest cinematographers of all time. He has won two Academy Awards and sixteen nominations for his cinematography of over 70 feature films.
Lens filters are one of the most affordable yet also most versatile accessories you can stow in your lens bag. Some of them, like polarizers and UV filters, are practically ubiquitous in modern-day photography, used both to lend images a unique look as well as to protect your costly gear.
The day after photography was invented in 1839, somebody pointed out that the photographs were just shades of gray – there was no color. The photography inventors knew this was a problem and probably hoped that no one would notice. Paintings were in vivid color and if photography was ever to compete with painting, there needed to be some color in them.
One of the more divisive positions that I find in photographers is their rationale for, or dislike of, black and white photography. “I love color,” I hear often. “I’m all about the colors.” Absolutely, color is cool. But I think the arguments in support of black and white are strong (some better than others!).
Ragnar Axelsson is an Icelandic photographer who has been working in the frigid Arctic for over 40 years and documenting breathtaking imagery of the desolate landscape and its people.
In many art practices, a new method or process does not usually automatically override the old one. You can still use berries and charcoal to paint a cave wall, paint on a canvas, or put pencil to paper. These do not become irrelevant just because a Wacom tablet can be used to make a digital illustration or a VR for a 3D painting.
Black and white images can tell entirely different stories than color. By removing all of the colors, the tones carry the weight of the story. There’s a lot of gray area (pun intended) when it comes to black and white images as there’s no right or wrong way to take them. In this article and video, I’ll be walking through a new way to edit black and white images in Adobe Lightroom.
Photographer Mitch Dobrowner's work is what you get when you combine storm chasing photography with fine art photography. His awe-inspiring black-and-white photos show dramatic storms over sweeping landscapes.
Capturing photos in black and white is quite a challenging task. It is certainly one of the most complicated fields of landscape photography. One needs to be very careful about the circumstances where the photos will actually look good in black and white.
Twenty years ago, few photographers would have questioned your choosing to go out with black and white film loaded in your camera of choice. Today, when I tell people my digital medium format camera shoots only in monochrome, I am prepared to receive just as much criticism as confusion.
Photographer Skander Khlif traveled to the North African country of Tunisia this past summer and spent days traveling along the coast. Along the way, he turned his lens on the joy of kids there growing up next to the sea and playing in the water as a way of life.
COOPH recently got together with London-based street photographer and co-founder of Street Photography Internationa Alan Schaller to talk about one of the most deceptively difficult forms of photography out there: black and white street photography.
Video journalist Logan Baker over at Shutterstock put together a handy primer for anybody who is looking to get into black-and-white photography for the first time. The tutorial amounts to an easy-to-follow beginner's guide that we highly recommend you check out if you're just getting started in this genre.
CatLABS has announced CatLABS X FILM 80, a new black-and-white negative film that is being launched in multiple formats.
Want to turn some old black-and-white photos into color photos? There's an amazing new website called Colourise.sg that'll get the job done for you. It uses deep learning AI to create remarkably realistic results in just seconds with zero work on your part.
I’m not sure on what day I realized that my street photography work had become overly homogeneous, and sometimes asinine. “Oh look, a red car and a red shirt. click.” I’d been in love with the look of Fujifilm’s Classic Chrome (based off of Kodak Kodachrome) and had begun to shoot a lot of color for color’s sake.
One of the earliest ways of creating color photos was by combining black-and-white photos shot using red, green, and blue filters. Matt Gray recently decided to use this technique to shoot color photos using his Game Boy Camera.
Something I’ve always found difficult was knowing when an image should be converted to black and white and when it should be left in color. It’s one of the more contested discussions in photography and there really isn’t a “black and white” or cut and dry answer to it. After much trial and error, I’ve come up with three questions that I consistently ask myself when trying to determine if a color image is a good candidate for B&W.
ADOX, the world's oldest photographic materials manufacturer, has announced a new monochrome film called HR-50 that will be available in 35mm, 120, and 4x5 formats.
Fujifilm killed off the last of its black-and-white film and photo paper back in April 2018. For many film photographers that news was like a dagger to the heart, but there is hope yet: Fujifilm is reportedly considering bringing its B&W film back.
Mexican photographer and social anthropologist Anuar Patjane uses his photos to drive attention to the beauty of Earth's oceans. In his impressive portfolio is a mesmerizing series of black-and-white photos showing divers being eclipsed by massive schools of swirling fish.
CineStill just announced a "holy grail" of film photography: a single-step monobath called Df96 for processing any black-and-white film. The company says it's the world's fastest process -- one that can develop your film in just 3 minutes, from start to finish.
In the 1950s, early color photography was widely scorned. Now it’s the default. What happened?
Photographer Luc Kordas first moved from Europe to New York City in 2014 after living in six different countries in six different years. Since then, he has made his living as a photographer while doing street photography for himself. And one of the recurring subjects he has captured is the idea of loneliness in a big city.
Ilford recently released a popular 8-minute video on how to process black-and-white film yourself, and now the film company is back again with another helpful crash course on how to make a black-and-white print in a darkroom. If you've never worked in a darkroom before, this intro is a great way to see what it's all about.
Mike Olbinski is one of the best in the business at combining time-lapse photography with storm-chasing, and his latest work is yet another jaw-dropping fusion of those two things. Titled Breathe, the 4-minute short-film captures the beauty and fury of thunderstorms in black-and-white 8K.
Silberra is a young analog photo company based in Russia that has big goals in the camera film industry: it just launched a $115,000 crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to mass produce over 6 new black-and-white film stocks.
Adobe is teasing an impressive new technology called Scribbler. It's an "interactive deep learning-based image generation system" that you can use to automatically colorize black-and-white photos. Above is a 6.5-minute demo of Scribbler.