Tips For Black and White

A few little tips here and there never hurt anyone aspiring to make their photos better, and I certainly don't think that there is any harm in helping those wanting to improve in the field of study that I love so much. I few little tips for successful B&W images will take you from average to amazing.

• Think about the shapes in your photo as opposed to the colors, since you will not be seeing them. Bringing your subjects into odd or opposing locations can be exciting in your framing, such as a person dressed in a dark color placed on concrete steps in the sunlight that will read white. The camera will bring a drama that will draw you into the subject, just because they are the dark and therefor, most powerful item in the visual plane.
  
• Use textures in place of colors.
• Amp up the contrast by shooting in harsher than normal lighting. Use dramatic contrast to bring out features in a face, or still life. Go near a window, take a walk outside and see what shapes you can see in the shadows created by the position of the sun.
  
• Consider the BLACK and WHITE, so that you don't end up with shades of gray in your photograph. Much of what frustrates me when I look at my shots at the end of a perfectly nice day of shooting in nature is the lack of impact because I forget to look for extremes in contrast. Nature has lovely colors in plants, but needs a discerning eye to bring out intricacies of natural plant structures and rock formations. The eye sees more than the camera, so you need to eliminate color from what you consider in your photograph; not an easy task in the Botanical Garden when you are out of practice.
• Always remember that the more you shoot, the more you can critique your work, and the better you will become. Your eye will edit out things that are distracting like power lines, but your camera will not. You will begin to notice and consider these things when you are framing your shots more and more, the more you shoot and review what you have worked on. Just like driving a car, at first you thought about it all the time; 10 and 2, and after some-teen years of driving, there is little thought to the actual mechanics of driving. The mechanics will become more natural the more you do them.