Hi
Could anyone inform me of a good tutorial which explains
the best way to do B&W photography with a digital camera?
Is there any setting I can use on my camera which would make the photos
look more like old B&W film photos?
What should be my thought process and work flow when doing this type
of photography?
I would appreciate it
Believe it or not .... the secret to the old time B&W photos were COLOR filters. (mostly dark-RED and dark-YELLOW, but also Green, Orange, Blue)
You can immediately transform any color photo into B&W with almost all the digital imagers; but you will have the same problem that existed without the use of colored filters.
What Is That Problem ???
B&W only knows the "amount" of light that is reflected from a subject. It of course does not know color.
Imagine for a minute to square panels on a wall ... one is RED and the other is GREEN.
To our eyes ... they look very different because they are on the opposite ends of the color spectrum ..... BUT both "reflect" the exact same amount of light.
Therefore both will B&W image the exact same "shade-of-gray" and look very bland.
So back in B&W days .... they could use a RED filter on the camera ... and the result was that the red panel appeared WHITE while the green one appeared BLACK.
Conversely, a green filter would have produced the exact OPPOSITE. So you see they had a lot of "control".
Can you do that in digital .... yes .... you can actually use those same filters .... or you can do it by manipulating color channels in your image viewer.
You can make TREES look darker or lighter ....
Another example is CLOUDS in the (blue) sky. Once again ... a "white" cloud is often the exact same light-brightness as the blue sky. Thus clouds usually disappear in a B&W photo, and appears all white.
A DARK YELLOW .... will darken the blue .... but actually a dark-RED does it even better because a "blue" sky is actually "cyan" and red is the exact opposite of cyan.
Have FUN !!! ...
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Thanks for reading .... JoePhoto
( Do You Ever STOP to THINK --- and FORGET to START Again ??? )
