When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. If you photograph them in black and white, you're photographing their souls. - Ted Grant (photojournalist)

Black and white photography, Black and white photography - in addition to the aesthetic effect, also good for learning photography (abbreviation SW, bw or b/w)

There are very good reasons to take up black and white photography. It makes sense to switch the camera to b/w, especially from the point of view of being able to recognize shapes and thus train your vision.

A key component of the bilder statement: color or black and white?

Another reason for b/w photography is that color can distract from the actual message of the picture. Therefore, you should always ask yourself in a photo whether the color distracts from the content or whether the content needs the color. Depicting a rainbow in black and white makes limited sense.

For successful black and white photography, we generally need appropriate contrast values.

But first, let's explain what actually happens in black and white photography. The vast majority of cameras work with color - there are only very few exceptions of digital cameras that only photograph in black and white. However, these cannot do color and are therefore, in addition to the price, only something for pure black and white lovers.

Our normal digital camera must therefore convert the photo taken in color into black and white. To do this, the different colors are given different shades of grey. This is where the art of black and white actually begins. A portrait can be converted from skin tones to black and white in a different way to a landscape photo. With the right choice of conversion, skin imperfections are either eliminated by black and white or extremely emphasized with the wrong conversion. That's why we like to do this conversion on the computer (and not automatically in the camera) and set the conversion to grayscale for the individual color areas ourselves.

For our goal of learning to take better photos through black and white photography, such subtleties are not important at first. What is important is the elimination of color to train our vision of shapes. At first, color has a stronger effect than shapes.

If you set the camera to black and white mode, it makes a lot of sense to also use the RAW format. This means that our bilders are still available in color! Only the JPG bilders are converted to black and white and shown on the camera display - this is where our learning effect comes in. If we want to have the motif in color later, we can use the RAW file and get our color bilder again.

Most digital cameras even have several different b/w modes. Depending on the subject, the conversion to grayscale is then carried out here. In portrait b/w mode, skin tones are rendered more beautifully. In landscape b/w mode, the focus is on the sky with clouds. But here too, the perfect conversion can only take place on the computer via bilder processing, in which you can let off steam creatively in the representation of the sky between dramatic and calm.

Have fun trying it out!