Seeing in Black and White

There's a photograph on my wall of a lighthouse at dawn. Grey sky, grey sea, grey rocks, grey lighthouse. Not a single colour in the entire image unless you count the forty-seven shades of grey, which you shouldn't, because that's precisely the point. It's the best photograph I've ever taken, and it's the best because there's no colour in it, not despite the fact.

I came to black and white photography the way most people come to it: by accident, through failure. I'd been shooting in colour for years, producing the kind of images that look perfectly fine on a screen and perfectly forgettable everywhere else. Pleasant compositions. Adequate exposure. Nothing technically wrong and nothing particularly right either. Tourist photographs, essentially, even when I wasn't being a tourist.

Then one day I converted one of these mediocre colour shots to black and white, mostly out of curiosity, and something remarkable happened. The photograph suddenly worked. The composition that had seemed merely acceptable became dramatically strong. The lighting that had been unremarkable became the entire point. It was as if the image had been wearing a disguise, and I'd finally stripped it away.

What happened, I realised later, is that colour had been lying to me. It had been propping up weak compositions, distracting from poor lighting, creating interest where none really existed. Remove the colour, and you're left with the skeleton of the image—the actual structure that either holds up or doesn't.

The Discipline of Subtraction

Black and white photography is, at its core, a discipline of subtraction. You're not adding an artistic filter. You're removing something fundamental—the very way humans naturally perceive the world—and seeing what survives.

This is harder than it sounds. Our eyes are drawn to colour in the same way they're drawn to movement; it's an evolutionary response that helped our ancestors spot ripe fruit and dangerous predators. A bright red object in a sea of green will always command attention, regardless of whether it's the most interesting thing in the frame. Colour is a cheat code. It creates visual interest whether you've earned it or not.

Remove the cheat code, and suddenly you have to earn everything. A photograph without colour must rely on contrast, on form, on texture, on the play of light and shadow. It must have something to say that doesn't depend on the wavelength of reflected light. This is both the challenge and the liberation of monochrome work.

The challenge is obvious: many photographs simply don't work without colour. That stunning sunset? Those autumn leaves? The blue hour at the harbour? All of them derive their power from colour, and removing it leaves you with nothing but disappointment.

The liberation is subtler but more important: once you start thinking in black and white, you start seeing differently. You stop chasing colours and start chasing light. You stop looking at what things are and start looking at what they look like. You begin to see the world as a composition of shapes and tones, not just objects in space.

Learning to See Light

The single most important thing in black and white photography is light. This is technically true of all photography—the word literally means "drawing with light"—but in colour work, you can often get away with ignoring it. Soft, flat, boring light? No problem. Just make sure you've got some nice colours in the frame and nobody will notice.

In black and white, there's nowhere to hide. Flat light produces flat images. Interesting light—dramatic, directional, contrasty—produces interesting images. It's that simple and that difficult.

The best light for black and white photography tends to be light that would be considered harsh or unflattering in colour. Midday sun casting hard shadows. Side lighting that sculpts faces and buildings into geometric forms. Backlighting that turns subjects into silhouettes. Light that creates contrast, defines edges, separates subject from background.

This is why many black and white photographers become slightly obsessed with time of day and weather conditions. They're not being precious; they're recognising that light is their primary raw material, and different light produces fundamentally different photographs.

A cloudy day that's perfect for portraits in colour might be useless for black and white landscapes. Conversely, the harsh noon sun that portrait photographers flee from can create spectacular results in monochrome street photography. It's a different game with different rules.

The Compositional Skeleton

With colour removed, composition becomes paramount. Every rule you've ever heard about composition—the rule of thirds, leading lines, frame within a frame, negative space—becomes approximately twice as important in black and white.

This is because colour provides a kind of compositional glue. A red dot in a sea of blue creates a relationship between those elements, a visual connection that your eye follows naturally. Remove the colour, and you need something else to create that connection. Usually that something is composition.

Black and white photographs tend to benefit from simplicity. Not minimalism necessarily—you can have a busy frame in monochrome—but clarity of purpose. What is this photograph about? What should the viewer's eye land on first, second, third? How does the arrangement of elements guide attention through the frame?

In colour photography, you can sometimes answer "what is this photograph about?" with "the beautiful colours." In black and white, that answer is unavailable. You need a better one.

Strong leading lines. Clear separation between subject and background. Deliberate use of negative space. Patterns and repetition. Contrast not just of tone but of scale, of texture, of complexity. These become your tools when colour is off the table.

Contrast and Tonality

If light is the raw material of black and white photography, contrast is the finished product. How you handle the relationship between the darkest and lightest parts of your image determines whether it feels dramatic or subtle, harsh or gentle, modern or timeless.

High-contrast black and white—deep blacks, bright whites, minimal grey in between—creates a graphic, punchy effect. Think newspaper photography, think street photography in the tradition of the mid-twentieth century masters. This is black and white that grabs you by the collar and demands attention.

Low-contrast work is softer, more nuanced, more interested in the full range of grey tones. Think misty landscapes, think fine art photography, think portraits with smooth, graduated tones. This is black and white that invites contemplation rather than demanding attention.

Neither approach is inherently better. What matters is matching your contrast to your subject and your intent. A harsh, high-contrast treatment can destroy a delicate portrait. A soft, low-contrast treatment can sap all the energy from a street scene. The technical choices should serve the image, not the other way around.

Shooting for Black and White

There's an ongoing debate about whether you should shoot in colour and convert later, or set your camera to monochrome from the start. Both approaches have merit, and the right answer probably depends on your workflow and psychology.

Shooting in colour and converting gives you maximum flexibility. You can decide during editing whether a particular image works better in colour or black and white, and you can use colour information during the conversion to fine-tune exactly how different tones translate into grey. A red filter effect, for instance, can darken blue skies and emphasise clouds, while a blue filter can brighten skies and darken foliage.

Shooting with your camera set to monochrome—even if you're capturing RAW files that retain the colour data—has a different advantage: it trains your eye. When you review images on your camera and see them in black and white, you start composing for black and white. You notice light differently. You stop being seduced by colour that won't survive the conversion.

Many serious black and white photographers use this approach, treating the monochrome viewfinder as a training tool even when they know they'll do their final conversion in software. The visual feedback, they report, fundamentally changes how they see.

The Texture Test

Here's a simple test for whether a scene will work in black and white: ask yourself whether there's interesting texture.

Texture—the visual representation of surface quality—is one of the things that black and white photography does better than colour. The roughness of tree bark. The smoothness of wet stone. The grain of weathered wood. The weave of fabric. All of these come alive in monochrome in a way that colour often obscures.

This is partly because texture is revealed by light and shadow, and black and white is fundamentally about light and shadow. It's partly because colour can distract from surface detail—our eyes are drawn to hue before they notice texture. And it's partly because the absence of colour invites closer inspection, a more careful kind of looking.

If you're standing in front of a scene and wondering whether to convert it to black and white, look for texture. Look for interesting surfaces. Look for things that would reward close attention. These are good signs.

Conversely, if the scene's interest lies primarily in its colours—a flower garden, a sunset, a neon-lit street—black and white might not be the right choice. You'd be removing the very thing that makes the image work.

The Emotional Temperature

Colour photography is warm. It's vibrant. It says, "This is how the world looks." Black and white photography is cooler, more abstract. It says, "This is how the world feels."

There's a reason that historical photographs are almost all black and white, and it's not just that colour photography hadn't been invented. It's that black and white has a quality of memory, of timelessness, of being one step removed from reality. A colour photograph is a document. A black and white photograph is an interpretation.

This emotional quality is worth considering when you're deciding how to treat an image. Some subjects benefit from the documentary feel of colour. Others benefit from the interpretive distance of black and white. There's no formula, but there is a question worth asking: what am I trying to say, and which approach says it better?

For subjects that are fundamentally about form—architecture, sculpture, geometric landscapes—black and white often works better. It emphasises shape over detail, structure over surface.

For subjects that are fundamentally about moment—a fleeting expression, an action caught mid-motion, a decisive instant—black and white can add a layer of drama and significance.

For subjects that are fundamentally about feeling—a melancholy portrait, a lonely street scene, a foggy morning—black and white provides an emotional resonance that colour often lacks.

Practice, Then Practice More

The only way to get good at seeing in black and white is to practice seeing in black and white. Shoot monochrome for a month. Convert everything you shoot. Force yourself to think without colour until thinking without colour becomes natural.

At first, you'll get it wrong constantly. Images you thought would work won't. Images you almost deleted will turn out to be your best work. Slowly, through trial and error and repeated failure, you'll develop an instinct for what will survive the subtraction of colour.

This instinct, once developed, improves all your photography—even your colour work. Because learning to see in black and white is really learning to see light, learning to compose strongly, learning to identify what actually makes an image work. These skills transfer. They compound. They make you better.

The man who taught me photography—an old newspaper photographer with a face like a weather map—said something I've never forgotten: "Colour is what things are. Black and white is what things mean."

I'm not sure he was entirely right, but he wasn't entirely wrong either. Strip away the colour, and you strip away the surface. What's left is the skeleton, the structure, the soul. If there's nothing there, you'll see it immediately. And if there's something there, you'll see that too—perhaps more clearly than you ever could in colour.

That's the gift of black and white: it shows you what you're actually looking at.

Not all of my photographs on this site are shot in black and white, but conceived that way from the start. You can see them in the Photography section. Feedback, as always, is welcome.