For those who know me, I’m a fan of black and white photography. Removing the color, paring down the photo to it’s essence, the monochrome, greyscale, lines and composition. The world of digital photography is over saturated with color pushed to the limits of human eye endurance. Don’t get me wrong, I love color and light. But something draws me to minimalism and the old school look of monochrome.

I grew up taking images with a simple film camera. A Kodak Duoflex. It carried 620 roll film and had one button: click to shoot. I still have this camera and treasure it as it sits on it’s display shelf.

In today’s digital world we take all images in color then convert them to black and white using software. The digital darkroom offers many options for this, the least favorite of mine is a simple desaturation. Software can preserve the color channels underneath the newly created black and white image. This allows you to control the image look in many ways. Not unlike the colored glass filters used when shooting black and white film. But better for control freaks… 😉 Endless possibilities exist today to refine and create the artists vision.

I have a Lightroom Preset I created as a starting point for this process if I want to work soley in Lightroom. I also use NIK Software Silver Efex Pro. Lately I have become enamored with the new Tonality from MacPhun. The image below was done using Tonality Pro.

Bringing out the essence of this well know mask and character, Tonality quickly gave me the look I wanted using a preset. The software then allows me to make adjustments to this in the adjustment panel. Final tweaking is done in Lightroom, as I always do.

This next year I want to focus a lot more on doing black and white images. So expect to see a lot more. Both portraits and landscapes. This image was taken at the Sedona Uptown Halloween Fest, a community event that is interesting to stroll and keep your camera at the ready…

Before & After images: (may take a moment to load)

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