The Challenge of Black and White Photography

A Collection of Black and White Photographs from Provence, 2023

My journey into fine art black and white photography started about 3 years ago when I discovered the work of Joel Tjintjelaar and began learning his processing techniques. Since that time, I’ve produced about a dozen images that I am proud of and consider worthy of the “fine art” label, but I’ve also had a growing interest in creating more general black and white images that don’t have to carry that label. However, I’ve struggled to produce “regular” black and white photos that I’m happy with.

The problem has been that black and white photography is hard.

“The photographers problem is to establish a configuration out of chaos”

Ansel Adams

I recently watched an interview with Ansel Adams from the BBC Master Photographers series in which he discusses photography while showing several photos in his gallery. One of the photos was of some cottonwood trees along the river in Yosemite against a granite wall backdrop, captured in the soft light of an early autumn morning.

He described the image as being “hopelessly dull in black and white,” yet the print he was holding in his hand was anything but. The trees clearly stand out from the granite cliff and the depth of the scene is evident in the image, yet the print retains the quality of softness that he described in the scene that he photographed. As he was talking about the difficult process of printing that particular negative, of separating the values of the trees and the rock, I suddenly realized the sheer amount of work that was required to create the print.

I’ve taken any number of images similar (in subject, not quality) to the one Ansel was discussing-and that is why I immediately recognized the effort and skill that such an image requires in order to be crafted into a piece of photographic art. Of course, the composition was excellent with every tree, branch, and rock carefully aligned just so. Of course, the exposure was carefully calculated based on light measurements of the scene. And of course, the negative was perfectly developed-Ansel was the master of all these things. But as his famous cliche says, “the negative is like the composer’s score; the print is the performance.”

I have countless photos of breathtakingly gorgeous scenes-the mountain stream running through the forest with the golden autumn leaves glowing in the late afternoon sunlight. In color, those images are just a jumbled mess of leaves and branches and rocks. In monochrome, it becomes just meaningless gray randomness. Ansel’s negative was no different; the difference was his ability to record that symphony of nature onto a piece of paper in the darkroom. As he stated in this same interview, “the photographers problem is to establish a configuration out of chaos.”

Without a doubt, every aspect of photography is easier today than it was for Ansel and perhaps this is most true in the creation of the print, or in our modern case, the processed image. Where Ansel had to carefully dodge and burn the image as it was projected onto the paper working quickly in darkness, today we can spend hours sitting at a desk taking as long as we need and endlessly doing and re-doing adjustments. However, processing the image is more than just setting white and black points and adding some contrast. Transforming the raw exposure into a photograph requires the ability to see the final print in the mind and the skill to manipulate the values so that the result on screen matches the visualization.

Ansel described this as the “intentional manipulation of value,” and this is what I mean by saying that black and white photography is hard. It is not only that, without the distraction of color, the composition and the quality of light in the image become more important. Processing the raw exposure requires not only greater skill and development of technique (how to manipulate the values); it also requires knowing what values to manipulate.

The images featured in this post were all captured this past summer on a wonderful trip to Europe with my family. None of these photos were captured with the intention of making them into black and white photographs. In fact, I processed just about every one of them first in color because, when I was reviewing the photos at home after the trip and specifically looking for images that could be black and white (before watching the interview with Ansel), I could not find any. But after watching that interview, I went back to the computer and starting recognizing these images as needing to be black and white photos.

The change was that I realized that while these photos had the potential to be good in black and white, they were going to require some real work to get there. So I started working watching tutorial videos on Youtube. Over the last few years I have watched probably every video on black and white photography that there is, and 99 percent of them are about converting photos to black and white rather than actually processing the black and white image. I quickly gave up on learning something useful from Youtube, realizing that I already know more than most of those “creators.”

It turns out I didn’t need to learn a new processing technique or skill, I just needed to apply what I already knew and put more effort into processing my images. Ansel Adams wasn’t lacking for skill to print that photograph of the trees in Yosemite, it was simply a difficult negative to print requiring much time and effort to produce the desired print that had been visualized. With this realization, I began processing these images with the mindset that I already knew that the images would make fantastic black and white images, I just had to find a way to get them there.

On our trip we spent about 10 days in France primarily visiting the small villages in the Provencal countryside but also spent a couple of days on the coast near Monaco. While there were not many opportunities for landscape photography on the trip, there were endless other subjects to be photographed, and I came back home with many wonderful images.

With the exception of the photo above of the cappuccino, these photos were all captured with my Sony a6600 paired with the 16-50 mm kit lens (or Samyang 12 mm f/2 for one photo).

All of these images were processed entirely in Lightroom with the exception of removing distracting elements using Generative Fill in Photoshop for a few of the photos.