Black n White Photography

This is a follow up of my post "Colours of Black n White."  Here I am gonna give out some knowledge and tips for shooting B/W images,  and all through self-learning.

Subject Selection.

Thanks to the user-friendly technological advancement, today any one can convert a picture into B/W using the available softwares and apps. But when you talk about creating a picture of professional quality, you don't just convert any random color picture into B/W, but you have to run your imagination. And *that's what makes you different from the numerous other camera owners out there.*

So its the imagination and your brain's creative juices  which will trigger when you see a location / subject and tell you that YES, THIS IS JUST THE THING WHICH MIGHT LOOK AMAZING IN BLACK AND WHITE. If we talk technical, any subject with a good balance of Bright and Dark Colors can result in a good B/W photograph. 

Sample

For this learning section, I am taking one of my own B&W picture as an example.

This is the view through my apartment window, a shabby old building *which is a common scene in Bombay*. The day I first saw the view, it was stuck in my head, and I thought to give it a shot. *My Imagination*. So then I took a sample shot in the evening just to see how will it look on camera, and this was the result.

I was a little disappointed with the output as it did not look at all the way I imagined it would. 

As evening dawned, people started to turn on the lights and suddenly, I noticed the balance of Brightness-*light* and Contrast-*dirty walls, trees*. And a thought of capturing the place at night struck me - * a learning section on Night photography coming soon :)*. 

I clicked some more pictures of the same place when it was a little dark. Due to the increased activity, being that time of the day, the pictures turned out to be a mix of motion blur and light trails *learning section for the same coming soon :)* and these were the results.

and I selected this image from the lot to publish.

Now the idea was to create a b/w photograph so the rest of the work was done in processing, where I turned the image into B/W and just enhanced the contrast and brightness. *Lightroom 4.1 was the application used to process the image*

So this is the final output, an amazing picture in just Black n White.

ISO 100

50 mm

f/10

30 sec. exp.

Tip - any subject with a good balance of Bright and Dark Colors can result in a good B/W photograph. 

I would love to hear about your experiences and thoughts. Do share it down in the comments column.

-Abhilash LR