BLACK & WHITE TECHNIQUE (3)

Make the most of light

Light has different meaning in black & white
photography compared to colour. When you take
a colour photograph, the light can actually have
a colour of its own – warm, as at sunrise and
sunset, or cold as on a cloudy or foggy day.
Colour film records these variations in the colour
of light even if the eye can’t see them. Similarly,
colour film records artificial lighting in a literal
way, so tungsten light produces an orange cast
and fluorescent a green cast.
Black & white film is clearly incapable of doing
this, which can have both positive and negative
effects on your photography.
From a positive point of view, there is no
colour to influence the mood of your pictures, so
you can shoot portraits or candids indoors in
artificial lighting and produce striking images
without worrying about a sickly orange cast
spoiling them.
The type of lighting that would normally
produce rather drab, boring colour photographs
– for example, an outdoor scene on a dreary
overcast day – can produce wonderfully
evocative black & white photographs, enabling
you to exploit conditions that would leave colour
photographers heading for home.
The downside is that you have to work harder
with light when shooting mono, because the
colour of the light cannot contribute to the
mood of the final picture – a black & white
sunset shot simply cannot compete with one
shot in colour, because without the golden glow
much of its emotional appeal will be lost.
Fortunately, this factor can also work in your
favour, because in using light to define shape,
texture, pattern and form – the elements on
which black & white photographs rely – your eye
for a picture can only get better.