Shoot dramatic black & white

Black and white photography remains one of the most popular genres in photography. At Digital Photographer we receive a huge number of monochrome images from photographers around the world, demonstrating a near-universal appreciation for the power of simplicity, light and shadow – the fundamentals of any image. While colour imaging can produce an accurate, life-like recreation of the world around us, black and white is able to transcend the natural to produce a unique, visceral representation of what our senses encountered in the field.

This may be due in part to the fact that, whether you are using a camera to study a scene or your own eyes, you are effectively seeing in monochrome. Both only ‘see’ light and shade – bright and dark. The sensor in a digital camera and the retina of your eye work by detecting differences in light intensity, gathering this information into a luminosity map, an arrangement of points of varying brightness – a black and white image. All of the colour information has to be added later, albeit seemingly instantly from our perspective, via the use of chemical pigments in the human visual system, or via the image