In this wonderful colourful world of ours why would anyone want to strip everything down to black, white and shades of grey? Quite simply because black and white imagery remains to be one of the most powerful photographic mediums and it still very much alive and well. All photography started as black and white originally until geniuses figured out ways of capturing colour on film, since then colour photography has come a very long way indeed but black and white certainly has not left the master photographers toolbox.

When you strip away all the colour in an image you get down to the bare essentials of life. A black and white photograph has a certain mystique about it and once all that colour is out of the way we get down to the life and soul of imagery at its most powerful. Where a colour image does not need much more than colour to get a WOW factor out of viewers, a black and white image needs to have a lot more going for it in order to captivate a viewer, stop them in their tracks and keep them looking at the image for a considerable length of time. Textures, tones and contrasts are the be-all and end-all of good black and white photography and few photographers ever master this delicate process which is not as simple as using some arbitrary plug in to turn a colour image into a black and white image.

"Harry Potter's World". This panoramic image of Glenfinnan in the Western Scottish Highlands was home to parts of some of the Harry Potter movies and ever since has become a tourist hot spot. The full size image weighs in at 93 megapixels and will soon be available for purchase in the online print ordering galleries. From Mitchell Krog's Scotland Landscape Photography Portfolio. (Copyright Mitchell Krog - All Rights Reserved)

With today’s advances in digital camera technology everything is about colour and even black and white digital photographers have to capture all their images in colour, that’s just the way digital sensors work. A black and white photographer however does not see the colour when he is taking the image, he already sees the tones, textures and contrasts in his minds eye and strips all the colour out long before even clicking the shutter knowing well that the image he has captured is going to make a great black and white image.

Anyone can make a black and white image !!! Yes anyone can, but few ever master the true time honoured techniques developed by masters like Ansel Adams. It is most easy to take any colour photograph and turn it into a black and white image, that can be done in under 30 seconds with any plugin developed for this purpose, but the chances of that image standing the test of time as a black and white masterpiece is rather slim. Black and White is not something to be used as an after-thought or a remedy for a poorly taken colour image, it is an image that was shot from the word go with the intention of the final image being black and white and there most certainly is a big difference between the two.

"Secluded" A fisherman braves the cold morning weather. A good black and white image has a wide range of contrasts, tones and textures which give the image depth and soul. From the Black and White Photography Collections by Mitchell Krog. (Copyright Mitchell Krog - All Rights Reserved)

As photography has advanced in recent years, photographers are continually in search of noise free images, meaning images with little or no film grain in the images. Stock Agencies continually feed this “noise free” perfection in images immediately rejecting images with even the slightest of noise. As such it has become the ultimate goal to produce noise free images and photographers will always be waiting for the newest camera body promising better noise handling while also developing an armada of noise removal techniques in Photoshop or their favourite image processing application. Unfortunately a great majority of photographers today have become too accustomed to publishing their images online in galleries and seldom ever take their work to print. Critiques delivered on online forums will immediately start off with the amount of noise in an image, this results in the photographer doing noise removal and smoothing of areas of the image to produce the perfect online image. But when it comes to taking that same smooth, noise-free image to print it does not necessarily produce a very good print versus an image that still has some natural grain still in the image. The grain actually gives life and depth to an image whereas important details are lost when that has all been smoothed out with noise removal software.

A good black and white image contains film grain and without it the image is flat, dull and most incredibly boring. If you happen to work with a professional print agency that’s knows their stuff, they will actually introduce grain back into images before printing them and once you have compared the two side by side you will think twice about producing super smooth images for print ever again.

"Deadwood". Black and white imagery contains a wide array of textures, contrasts and tones. Film grain adds life and depth into the image. From Mitchell Krog's Black and White Photography Collections. (Copyright Mitchell Krog - All Rights Reserved)

Watch out for more articles on black and white / monochrome imaging by South African Black and White Fine Art Photographer Mitchell Krog.