Black & White Photography Tips

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Rebecca Guenther, with www.M5A1photography.com, and I'm going to tell you about some black and white photography tips. When you're shooting black and white photography there are obviously, these days, two different ways to do it. You can be shooting black and white film which doesn't give you an option; you're just shooting black and white, or you can shoot digitally, which is captured in color and you will have to convert to black and white. If you're shooting film you need to keep in mind that since it is just going to be black and white, and there's not a whole lot of wiggle room on it you want to make sure that your blacks are black, your whites are white, and you have a full tonal range of grays in between the two. This is going to involve knowing your lighting, and knowing your subject, and learning over time through experience how to capture these images, and it might be a little bit more difficult. Doing it digitally it's a little bit easier. You can take a good photograph in color and then manipulate it digitally to be black and white. When you're doing this digitally it can go almost any direction. You can just desaturate it, which means just removing all of the colors, or you can go into the channel mixer and adjust how each color turns black and white. For example, you can make everything that's red turn white or black, and you can do that with red, green, blue, black and cyan, magenta, yellow. And those are some tips on black and white photography."