Wild Art

Removing colour from a wildlife image provides a degree of abstraction, and can elevate a picture from something illustrative to a piece of art.

- David Tipling

A renaissance in black & white has swept through the wildlife photography world. Perhaps brought about by the ease of conversion of a digital image from colour, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition added a black & white category giving further encouragement, plus a number of high-profile wildlife and environmental photo books showing off monochrome imagery have all helped bring it to the fore. Take a look at Sebastião Salgado’s magnificent book Genesis, and it is hard to resist embracing the medium. Many photographers feel it is a way of elevating a picture from something illustrative to a piece of art, which takes on a timeless quality.

My own experience from selling my work through a gallery reflects this idea that a black & white image has an artistic edge over a similar, or the same, image presented in colour. This is perhaps a perception born from a cultural and historical perspective, but removing colour from an image does provide a degree of abstraction which no doubt fuels this perception.

Many cameras allow you to shoot in a black & white mode, however I feel it is better to shoot in colour, as there will be no loss or quality issues in converting your image from colour to monochrome. Furthermore by shooting in colour you preserve the RGB colour channels, which may be used to alter the look of your black & white image when processing.

Choosing pictures to convert