In this article, we will explore a handful of essential photography tips for shooting in black and white. Black and white images often are portrayed as a dramatic photography form as they tend to convey emotion that may not be achieved in a color photograph. As you’ll see in the following paragraphs, most of the photography tips for achieving successful back and white images center on subtlety, and how to use the power of light and shadows to bring out the details of your subject. If you’re serious about taking great black and white photographs, Henry Horenstein’s Black and White Photography is the gold standard in black and white photographic manuals. After coming across this book several years ago, my black and white shots improved by leaps and bounds.

Working With Natural Lighting
Since black and white images are actually grey, black, and white, we actually end up with quite a range of contrasting tones with which we can work. Natural lighting is a powerful source of emotional makeup within an image. For instance, utilizing lower light in the evenings may cast a more somber, brooding scene than working with the soft, misty warm tones of a morning sunrise or the harsh, sterile lighting of the midday sun.
These various lighting conditions can be especially powerful when combined with black and white landscape photography. For example, ordinary trees which may not constitute a very complex composition in color can be photographed in the early morning or late evening to compose shadows and silhouettes which make for a much more intriguing piece.

Photographing Silhouettes
Perhaps you’ve seen photographs of silhouettes which utilized interesting angles to create a more complex and intriguing composition. The essential beauty of photographing silhouettes is that it distills the shape of your subject to a simplicity which achieves a certain degree emotion. Therefore one of the most essential photography tips for capturing silhouettes is to always concentrate on the shape and form of your subject.

Capturing Emotional Images
Tonality is the primary ingredient in capturing emotional black and white images. Once you have mastered the ability to manipulate the available lighting and shadows, you will begin to notice how you can impart varying degrees of tone into your images to produce the desired effect. One of the primary and most intriguing instances of this in black and white photography is the use of very stark contrasting between well-lit elements of your composition which appear to be near to the white end of the tonality spectrum and dark elements which appear closer to black. By creating these hard contrasts, you will often capture an element of dimension and depth of field which makes your subject appear to be 3-D.

In this age of artificially over-saturated effects in color images, black and white photography can be a refreshing approach to provide rich contrast to your images. It can also be a terrific way to draw the focus onto the subtle details and emotion of your subject. Once you master these black and white photography tips, you’ll capture rewarding images full of tonality that you may not be able to produce with color images.