Exercise 15: Black and white

Exercise 15 Black and White

Choose a subject. Lighting condition or picture situation that you think may look better in black-and-white than in regular colour.  In shooting you should try to ignore the colour element. 

Compose and expose for the black and white version that you will later process.  Process the image for black and white, and write down what effect shooting in black and white had on your choices of subject, framing, details of composition and exposure.  Note the results in your learning log.

Original Image

My original image was a colour portrait of a fellow student. I had to do some post processing as there was a fairly obvious red area on his forehead which I removed with the help of the Clone tool.

I took the image with one soft box to the front left with a black background. There is just a small catch light in his right eye but the light had been positioned to throw the left side of his face in almost total darkness.

I applied the Sharpening filter and then used the Desaturate control to change it to black and white.

I felt that this image was far stronger than the coloured images as the discrepancies in Jan’s skin tones no longer distracted the eye from the main overall image.  The tee shirt also seems more defined than as a coloured item.  Generally the image is much better in black and white than colour.