DRAMATIC BLACK & WHITE

Pro Jeremy Walker shows you how to get more from monochrome photography when shooting landscapes, portraits and urban scenes

- Jeremy Walker

PEAK DRAMA

Research your subject, its location, and how it will interact with the light and prevailing weather conditions

There's a tendency these days T for photographers to ignore the noble and often subtle art of black-and-white photography, and instead go for the super-saturated colours so liked by the social media and Instagram generation.

Black-and-white images are photography in its purest form. Colour can be a big distraction, with the viewer's attention drawn by the vibrancy of an image; not by the subject matter and its composition, tone, texture and details, but a large in-your-face splash of bright, primary colour.

There is nothing wrong with colour, but black-and-white photography has an honesty to it that colour images just don't possess - after all, you can't just reach for the saturation slider to make the image pop. Of course, you can call on post-production trickery with black-and-white photography just as you can with colour, but you have to work that little bit harder in the first instance to actually see the mono image.

You have to be able to respond to shape, tone, texture and shadows, rather than to colour, and visualising a black-and-white image is sometimes not a straightforward process. Knowing how to use your software, and how it, and you, will interpret your file is just as important as capturing the original scene - and shooting the original scene can be tricky enough All location shoots have to be planned, but there's far more to shooting a black-and-white landscape than just getting up for a sunrise or hanging around at the end of the day to catch a pretty sunset and a few pink clouds. Researching your subject and its location, and how it will interact with the light and prevailing weather conditions, become critical. Black-and-white location photography is rewarding but also challenging - here's how to get the most from it.