Why Black and White Photography on Wet and Rainy Days is a Great Opportunity
“A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.”
― Ansel Adams
Ever since I got into digital photography, I’ve sought out the best places on the internet to connect with other photographers and artists.
I do this to learn something I don’t know. Some of these places are good, some are full of erroneous advice that makes you feel as if you are in an echo chamber.
These internet spaces tend to bang on about the size of their sensor, and which settings are best for such and such a type of photography — and people actually give their meaningless answers.
I don’t spend much time on those forums anymore.
Good advice is that it doesn’t much matter what type of camera you have; an old DSLR, a mobile phone, or a mirrorless, an analogue camera will do the job, and you can work at pushing limits on all of them.
The weather changes rapidly, and that’s all we need to know; it’s when we are busy on the street taking photos that we need the knowledge of how to react quickly, both technically and mentally.
Long ago, I was an oil painter. I learned about oils, pigments, and grounds. These are the materials I used to create paintings.
This training helped me understand that when it comes to creating images, my mind is my main tool. What I see in front of me is the material, and I should have the skills and knowledge to do something clever with those materials.
Those ideas transferred well into photography. Colour and tone are a basic-knowledge that a photographer should have.
When I look at the work of other photographers, and I see that they have achieved an effect that I don’t fully understand, I search through the old painters.
The Germans for their Northern Light, the Dutch for precision and contrast, and the American painters for subject matter and 20th century colour. Somewhere in their work I’ll see how they manipulated the tones of colours and greys to achieve an effect that I hadn’t thought possible.
Doing this helps me understand how a photographer like Gregory Crewdson achieved the lighting he does, or how Harry Gruyaert creates such well thought out compositions.
Who would’ve thought that an American family praying before their fast-food meal would make a piece of everlasting art? It was only meant to be the front cover of the Saturday Evening Post.
Or a Heathcliff type of character standing in silhouette on a misty Bavarian cliff top? Or a young farm worker with cool skin tones bringing in the morning milk, the northern light of Germany reflecting gently on her pale fingers and cheeks.
The “window paintings” of the Dutch Masters are the hunting grounds I like best. I see how beautiful and powerful an image is when it is the result of deep thought, endless sketching and planning, and finally it then goes through the painstaking process of applied human skill. You can’t beat it — Artificial Intelligence.
It’s not the sunshine or shadows that make a photo worth keeping. Whatever it is that the photographer puts into it, the heart, the energy, and the desire to see something special is that special ingredient that makes a photo a worthy keeper.
If you’re out on the street and you want to shoot colour photography, then knowledge of tones of colour are extremely important in your photographic education.
Thinking about cool tones, and warm tones of colour helps the mind to organise what you see into a colour composition.
Alas, on the street we don’t control everything — such as people with bad dress sense. The street is chaos. Grime, oil, rain and wind can turn everything good into a soaking mess of trash blowing through the street. And that’s okay, but it’s a big challenge at times.
“You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”
― Ansel Adams
Yesterday, I went out in spite of the rain. It’s been a drizzly week, the sun is playing hide and seek each day. I decided that I needed to walk, look and hopefully return home with at least one shot that might be worth keeping.
As soon as I hit the street I realised that the sun was nowhere to be seen. Looking around, flat grey tones, and the familiar colours of the street that normally pop and sparkle reflected the sombre tones of grey clouds.
As I plodded along the road to the underground station, I thought about my approach; definitely go monochrome and keep it that way throughout my photo walk. I didn’t want disappointments, so colour photography was off the menu.
A dull day is all about looking at subtle tones. Now that’s an interesting way to look at the street. It offers a photographer the gamut of dampened colours to work with, and the challenge to improve knowledge about how to look at subjects on the street.
The more you think in black and white, the more you see that there are many tones and highlights to work with. The spectrum of black to white opens up a scene of blocks of shadow that gently form and recede, soft light that falls and creates pallid faces and blue shadows.
Black and white photography has something poetic about it, it also lends itself to nostalgia and sadness.
We take photos to hold down time, to capture the moment and keep it in a box for later. A time in the future when we open the box of old photos and choose one, can be a joyous moment. A memory worth keeping.
Black and white photos capture so many tones that when I’ve pulled out an old photo, and thought it must be ten or twenty years old, I’m astonished to discover that I only took the shot two years earlier; it just had an atmosphere about it, the expression on people’s faces, and the old wooden table they were leaning on made me think of yesteryear, all because it was in black and white.
Black and white photography is an all round set of tones, robust and useful in every situation to any discerning photographer.
If colours don’t work, or if you have no control, try monochrome and it’ll probably help you change your perspective; if you were looking at the subject and just knew it’s a shot to take, then maybe switching to black and white was the last step needed for success.
Notes and Links
Gregory Crewdson — Fine Art Photographer
Harry Gruyaert — Photographer
Norman Rockwell Painting, “Saying Grace”
