Black and White Photos and their origins…

Camera photography was invented in the 1820s, however, before that time, people relied heavily on traditional media for capturing images, such as paintings, sketches, and drawings.

During this time Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a French inventor, who is usually credited as the inventor of photography, developed heliography. This was a technique he used in 1825 to create the world’s oldest surviving product of a photographic process: a print made from a photoengraved printing plate (bitumen-coated pewter). The process was thought to have taken eight or nine hours, however a later researcher found that it actually took several days of exposure in the camera to adequately capture such an image on a bitumen-coated plate. Talk about long exposure photography!

Famous Black and White Photographers

Ansel Adams (1902-1984)

Robert Capa (1913-1954)

Brassai (1899-1968)

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004)

Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015)

Why I personally love back and white photographs…

There are many reasons that I, in particular, love back and white photographs. For me, it brings that feeling of nostalgia of the photo being a throwback to a bygone era of photography. I feel that with the image being in black and white, it subtly brings attention to the subject itself, and in some, unspoken way, actually translates the emotion captured in that moment. It is almost timeless in the way that the contrast between the highlights and the shadows of a black and white photo can convey drama, romanticism, calming, and, or just the simplicity of the scene. Being that black-and-white photography came before color, it’s almost as if it’s in our DNA to  associate monochromatic images with the past, even when they portray a current event. As a result, subjects who have that same timeless, romantic, or nostalgic look tend to work well when photographed in black and white.

How do I choose what images to switch to black and white?

I generally like to take images that show emotion and convert those to monochromatic as it forces us, as a viewer, to focus on the emotion. If the particular image that I’m processing has an abundance of contrast and texture, I like to transform it into black and white as I feel it just makes for an all-around more interesting and pleasing photograph.