LTP 131: Rethinking Monochrome 2

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• Bart Busschots (host) – @bbusschots – Flickr

In this solo show Bart shares his new-found enthusiasm for shooting in monochrome, some thoughts on what makes a black and white photography different, and some tips for converting colour images to monochrome.

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It’s not that I’ve never published monochrome shots, but they’ve been rare exceptions, and few if any were shot to be monochrome. Instead, they became monochrome to rescue them or as an afterthought while processing. That’s not to say I don’t really like the monochromes I’ve created, I do, or they’d never have left my phone, but they were basically happy accidents!

One of the things I’m most enjoying about being active on Glass is that I’ve discovered some photographers who have absolutely mastered photographic styles and techniques I haven’t. I’ve been following some photographers who primarily shoot monochrome and over the last few months they’ve been slowly nudging me towards really trying my hand at monochrome, not as an afterthought, but to envision shots as monochromes even before I press the shutter.

To reliably shoot great monochrome shots you really do need to shoot them with intention, so you need to think differently. I’m by no means a monochrome expert, quite the opposite, I’m a keen student. This. Means I’ve been thinking deeply about it, and I’m inspired by it, so I figured I’d share my thoughts in the hope of spreading my excitement and inspiration

Inspiring Photographer — Om Malik

The first primarily monochrome photographer I discovered on Glass was a re-discovery of a kind. Before he experienced a bit of a health crisis and re-prioritised some things in his life Om Malik was a regular tech commentator on some of the podcasts I listened to at the time, and I really liked his take on things. Finding him on Glass was unexpected, but very enjoyable. Om shoots mostly in monochrome or with such muted colours they shots almost feel monochrome despite their pastel colours. His work is much more minimalist than mine, and his focus is on expansive-feeling landscapes. Whether working in true monochrome or with minimalist colours he tends to balance his shots towards the white end of the scale so they feel very peaceful and often almost dream-like. His subjects are often surprisingly small in terms of the percentage of the frame they take up, and yet they still dominate because of the general minimalism of the shots. He also shoots and processes many of his sea-scapes in a very cool way so the sea and sky seem to merge together around the subject. He intentionally makes use of the kind of grey days with flat light most photographers dread to help achieve his distinct feel.

From his choice of subjects and conditions to his technical choices while shooting to his choices in digital darkroom it's clear Om is envisioning his unique monochrome look. I really enjoy and admire Om's work, but his style is completely different to what I want to shoot. But, the big lesson I took away was that in order to shoot great monochrome shots in any style, it can't be an afterthought, you need to be deliberate about it at literally every stage of the process.

Check out Om's work on Glass — glass.photo/…

Inspiring Photographer DevinSPX

The second monochrome photographer on Glass to really catch my eye is a Berlin photographer with the username @DevinSPX. His style could not be more different to Om's. Devin shoots mostly architecture, and his monochromes are loud and dramatic with deep inky blacks, strong whites, and above all, eye-catching shapes. In fact, it's the use of monochrome to emphasise shape over colours that really attracts me to Devin's work.

It takes a really good eye to be able to see a rich vibrant cityscape with an infinity of possible compositions and to see past the colours and spot the perfect sub-set that contains interesting shapes. I find it very hard to find eye-catching sub-sets of buildings that work on their own as great shots. I'm for ever being distracted by the whole, and missing the parts.

The combination of his amazing eye for shapes and his really bold and dramatic monochrome processing are what draw me into Devin's shots time after time. His choice of subject is completely different to mine, but I think his bold contrasty style is much closer to what I see in my minds eye when I'm thinking of my own monochrome shots.

Check out Devin's work on Glass — glass.photo/…

What Makes Monochrome Different?

So, all this got me thinking — if I want to shoot intentional monochromes, not just monochrome rescues and happy accidents, how do I need to start thinking differently? What makes for a great monochrome shot, and how is that different to a colour shot?

Contrast & Key are Monochrome’s ‘Colour’

With a colour shot you can choose to have it ‘pop’ with strong vibrant colours, or to feel gentle with soft pastel colours. When you’re shooting in monochrome your analogous artistic lever is contrast.

A very contrasty monochrome with lots of bright whites and inky blacks is a monochrome that ‘pops’ like a colour shot with lots of vibrant colour. A histogram will show a very broad peak not falling off until near both edges.

Similarly, a gentle monochrome will have much lower contrast, more of the pixels will be at a similar level of brightness to each other. On a histogram the peak will be much narrower.

A related choice you have is where you put the peak of your histogram — the neutral choice is to put the peak in the middle, with most of your pixels bing in the so-called mid-tones.

But, if you choose to have a narrower peak, why assume that peak should be in the middle? Why should most of your pixels be a middling grey, maybe you could slide the peak left towards the black end of the histogram, or you could slide it right towards the white end. We tend to call these ‘low key’ for histograms dominated by blacks, and ‘high key’ for histograms dominated by whites.

Choosing to move the peak of your histogram off-center is a bit like choosing to shift your colours off a neutral white balance — you can make an image feels softer, warmer, and more gentle by shifting your colours towards the red, or you can make your shots feel colder and harsher and more aggressive by shifting them toward the blue.

When you shift your histogram towards the white end, your shots feel softer, gentler, and perhaps even dreamy, and when you shift the histogram towards the black end you a more sultry ‘noir’ feel.

Shape & Texture are Emphasised

Colour really catches our eyes, so when you have a scene with lots of different colours, that's what our eyes will notice. When you subtract the colour, other things get to shine.

Something I've really noticed is how larger-scale shapes, even those made up of multiple objects of different colours, or single multi-coloured objects draw the eye much more when the colour is subtracted. For example the shapes of shadows cast on multi-coloured surfaces stand out much more clearly in monochrome than in colour.

I find monochrome shots also work much better at emphasising textures. I think there are actually two reasons for this — firstly, when you remove the distraction of colour the texture will just stand out more, but, there can be more to it than that. The kind of edits that will emphasise textures are also likely to distort colours, making them look unreal, but when you're not showing those colours, that's rather irrelevant isn't it!

This is a nice transition to some things I've noticed when creating monochromes.

Useful 'Superpowers'

As I'm creating more monochrome shots of my own I'm noticing that pleasing monochromes can often result from edits that would produce ugly colour shots, and from scenes that would be extremely difficult to capture well in colour.

You Can Edit with a Heavier Hand

When I'm working in colour I apply edits with a very gentle hand, because I'm not a fan of styles that look edited. Some people can make that work in colour, but it's just not my thing. I like my shots to look real, but just a little more polished than actual reality. But, when I'm editing in monochrome, I'm finding myself sliding the sliders a lot further, and getting very pleasing results as I do. Not having to worry about edits having a side-effect on colour turns out to be really liberating!

Mixed White-balance Doesn't Matter

Because I like my colours strong, a problem I run into a lot is mixed light making shots look unnatural. During the golden hour the natural white balance for the sun-lit parts of the scene is very different to that for the parts in shadow, so when you edit to make the sky look great, the shadows go way too blue, and when you edit to make the shadows look natural the sky loses its punch. To avoid this I simply minimise the mix by avoiding big shaded areas in my composition, and keeping their exposure low so their colour is naturally muted. If you measured it, it would be too blue, but because it's so close to black, we don't notice, so it's fine.

In monochrome that just doesn't matter, so loads more potential compositions open up!

You can Shoot Against the Light

In a similar vein, when you shoot colour shots against the light you either have to push things to a near silhouette, or, the shaded areas will look muddy and terrible. I'm finding that when I shoot those self same shots in monochrome, they can look great!

Some Thoughts on Conversions

If you really want to get super serious about shooting monochrome you could of course get a dedicated camera that only captures brightness levels, and those have some advantages. For a start, each pixel can be a single pixel, rather than three pretending to be one, so your shots will simply be sharper, but that's not something most of us do. I for one shoot almost all my shots with my phone these days, so I'm always starting with a colour image, and ten converting it to monochrome when I process.

You might look at the need to do a conversion as a chore, but I see it as an opportunity. In a monochrome image, every pixel has just one value — its brightness, 0 is black, and some highest value is white, and all the greys are in between. A colours image effectively have three brightnesses for each pixel — a red brightness, a green brightness, and a blue brightness. When you do a monochrome conversion you need to merge each pixel's three brightnesses into one new value using some kind of algorithm.

The simplest way to do this is simply to average the three values. This is basically what happens when you do your conversion by simply sliding the saturation slider to zero. This can often work really, but you're effectively doing is choosing to have colour have no impact on your final image.

As weird as it may sound, you have another choice — you can proactively choose to let each pixel's pre-conversion colour influence its post-conversion brightness. You do this through a tool we refer to as the channel mixer. You won't find this tool in the built-in camera app on your iPhone (and probably not on any other phone either), but you will find it in many of the more advanced editors available on our phones. Personally, I use the mobile version of Lightroom which has a very advanced channel mixer.

The simplest channel mixer will give you three sliders that let you bias the effect each of the input colours has on the output brightness. With a straight conversion you take the three input brightnesses, average them, and that's the output brightness. With a channel mixer you multiply each input value by a given factor before you do the average, the position of the slider for each channel changes the factor for that channel. Effectively, you have a gain slider for each input value that takes effect before they get averaged. So you can, for example, brighten the grass and darken the sky by moving the sliders so the green brightness for each pixel gets doubled and the blue brightness halved before the average is taken.

With a three-channel slider it's easy to assert control over primary colours, but not over other colours, to emphasise those you would need to more two or even three sliders in a coordinated way, that's difficult. This is why more advanced channel mixers will give you more sliders. These sliders match to colours between the primary colours, and under the hood they are adjusting the three gain settings in tandem to deliver your desired result. Some editors get even more advanced by letting you pick any colour at all to adjust using an eye-dropper or a crosshairs tool, this gives you very fine-grained control over each colour's impact on your monochrome shot.

If you're wondering, the reason I use the mobile version of Lightroom is that it has 8 colour channel sliders and a cross-hairs tool!

Final Thoughts

I still have so much to learn, but by following monochrome photographers, studying their work carefully, and then trying my own hand at the craft, I'm making good progress adding another tool to my artistic toolbox, and more importantly, having lots of fun along the way! If you don't already shoot monochrome, I hope I've inspired you to have a go!