The Curse of Black and White

I’m bewitched by black and white photography --especially black and white FILM/PHILM, that’s why I’m trying hard to mimic the look of it on my D90.

But, alas! After a few months of filmlessness, I bought an old Nikon F3 film MANual focus SLR camera from ebay. Damn it’s really cheap. Finally I can shoot film again! I’m overjoyed. The first film that I loaded into the classic SLR was a Kodak Tri-X black and white film. Black and white FILM mate! Just imagine how awesome it is. After finishing the roll of film I got it developed for about 13 bucks and voila! Here are the results:

Ok that’s like my dream maybe. I shall save it till I get a real F3.. Anyway back to reality (digital):

This is my first serious attempt of shooting in Black and White. Instead of following the common method of shooting in colour and converting the photos into greyscale when post-processing (so that the photographer can have fine control of every single colour channel), I used in-camera Black and White mode (in JPEG of course, as usual): sharpening +9 (maximum, to make it grainy with high ISO), contrast +3 (maximum), and yellow-filter effect (the most important thing). I’m making the photos film-ish, mate. The yellow-filter is important as many black and white film shooters use a yellow warming filter all the time (because black and white films are less sensitive to warm colours).

Proof that I don’t own an F3.

I realized that shooting in-camera black and white mode can help me to visualize things in greyscale better because as I shoot along, all the images were recorded and displayed on my camera’s rear LCD as black and white- thus I get instant feedbacks on how my images look like in black and white, and from there, I learn to visualize how would a scene look like in greyscale, and shoot accordingly.

Another thing about black and white photography is that it is generally contrasty and therefore suitable to shoot in all kinds of weather conditions- like dark, moody days, which colour shooters will whine about the bad weather (like how I used to). Besides, since colour is absent, it means that there are less distractions in the photographs. But, as the photographer can’t make use of colours to isolate a subject from its surroundings, thus he can only make use of shapes, contrast, bokeh, or other techniques to achieve the goal.

Yes mate, black and white romance.

P.S: Hmm don’t you think that something is missing from the photos? Yes… GRAINS. Grains are pleasing, my friend.

“Those are grains. They’re supposed to be there.”

P.S.S: Love you, my dear =)