Tips for Black & White Photography

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Lara Blair and I own Lara Blair Images Portrait Studio in Camas, Washington and today I'm going to be talking to you about tips for black and white photography. What makes a really great black and white image is you have contrast in the image, without either blowing out the highlights or losing detail in the blacks. Lot of really great black and white images that you see in museums and books and things, there's a nice black in there and there's a nice white. But in the black you can really see the details like folds in fabrics, and in the whites you can see the details not just sheet white like if you're talking pictured of like a bed for instance, you can see the folds in the sheet, that's a really nice, a nice black and white image has detail. I'm assuming that you'll be taking pictures with a digital camera, there are two ways that you can create a black and white image with digital photography. The first way is to put your camera on black and white mode. Some cameras have it, some cameras don't. I don't suggest this because you tend to lose information in the image when you throw the color away so to speak, when you're have it on black and white mode. It's better to take the images in color and then download them into Photoshop, which is the standard industry software for image manipulation. You can take a class with Photoshop or you can look on Amazon, for there are tons of great books about Photoshop, lots of Photoshop gurus that break it down into nice simple steps. There are also online tutorials even if you just put into a search engine Photoshop you can find tons of little tutorials that you can watch from the privacy of your own home which is great. When you work on these images, what you're really doing is you're taking the color out and you're making sure that there's enough contrast to make it a beautiful black and white image without losing the detail."