The Power of Black and White
Black and white photography concentrates your mind on certain aspects of your subject - shape, form, tones and light. Although color can often help to invoke mood and emotional states, there is something more visceral, more tactile, more primitive and more powerful about seeing in black and white.
The Eye and Color
We experience the world around us as color, but actually we mainly see in black and white. Most of the retina at the back of our eye is made up of 'rods', which can't distinguish color (and hardly notice red at all.) We distinguish red and green with a relatively small number of 'cones' found only in the small central area of the retina; roughly 2/3 of these detect red light, and 1/3 green. Blue is handled by even fewer cones, spread out around the rest of the retina among the rods.
Our brains produce color vision mainly using black and white information.
In low light, we lose color vision completely, as signals come only from the more sensitive rods. Given all this, it is hardly surprising that black and white images retain a special significance.
Cultural Signals
We are also cultural beings, and black and white gathered considerable cultural meaning from the hundred years or more it was the only or the dominant mode of photography, whether in the domestic or wider sphere. It was only in the 1950s and 1960s that color began to be common both in family snapshots and the media. 20 years or so later it was recognised as a viable artistic choice for photographers, with 'The New Color Photography', though photographers had been using color for years.
Once color had arrived, black and white seemed old-fashioned, and people rushed to replace Box Brownies with cameras were more suited to color film, and throwing out black and white TVs for the new color models. But their remained a huge reservoir of black and white photography of great events - wars, disasters and happier occasions - and together with the continuing use of black and white in newspapers (until recent years) this gave black and white a seriousness as the medium of record which color has only recently begun to challenge.
Many photographers still occasionally like to put a roll of a favorite black and white film - perhaps Kodak Tri-X or Ilford XP2 - into a 'real' camera and go out to take pictures. But for most of us it is usually much easier to use a digital camera and convert the color images it takes to black and white.
Your Camera in Black and White
Most digital cameras have a 'black and white' mode, but none actually take pictures in black and white. They produce pictures in color, then simply throw away the color information. The results often disappoint.
For a better result, you can shoot in color, then use your computer to convert to black and white; there you can tben see the different possibilities and select the best. And you can do it for nothing.
Free & Simple Ways to Black and White Picasa
Picasa is great free software for looking after your digital images and sharing them. You can read more about it the Picasa review, and download it from Google. If you open the software and double click any one of your images, it opens in the Edit window. Select Effects, and you can then choose from B/W, Sepia and Filtered B/W. The most interesting is the Filtered B/W. Click on the button for 'Choose a color' and then slowly move your mouse around the color picker window that appears and watch how your image changes. You can darken blue skies by moving into the orange and red areas, lighten any particular color by moving to it.
Above the main color picker are a set of color hexagons representing the typical color filters that black and white photographers sometimes used, although there doesn't seem any good reason to limit yourself to these.
Once you have found the color that gives the best rendering of your images, just click on it. You can then choose to apply the effect and return to your image library.
Once you have seen the different ways you can convert an image you will probably never want to leave it to chance and your camera again.
Irfanview
Irfanview is a great program for viewing and simple editing of images, and is free for non-commercial use.
It doesn't really have a great deal to offer for black and white conversion on its own, but does have the ability to use some (not all) Photoshop Plugins, which can make it very useful.
Irfanview offers two ways to convert images to black and white, and these also make clear the difference between what black and white means to photographers and computer people. Black and White film is an analogue medium, capable of producing many different shades of grey between black and white. On computers we always deal with digital files, and to get images that look like black and white photographs needs a reasonably large number of possible shades.
On a computer, black and white is used to mean just that - a system that can have only black or white. This means each pixel (element of the picture) has only two possible values, which can be represented in a single bit as 0 or 1. It is possible to get the effect of different shades by using patterns of pixels - which is how inkjets, laser printers and newspapers produce black and white images.
Most photographs on computer systems are stored as jpeg images. These allow 256 grey shades including white and black, enough to show most photographs at least as well as photographic printing. You can have files with just these 256 shades (greyscale jpeg) but most actually use the normal jpeg RGB format in which these 256 shades are part of the 16 million possible colors.
In Irfanview, the you can convert to grayscale to show your pictures as 256 color images. You can also see the poster-like high contrast effect of a black and white conversion, by using Image, Decrease color depth, and choosing 2 colors. The images on this page show the obvious difference.
