Category: Originals
-
How to Find a Photograph Inside the Chaos
Busy scenes are some of the hardest to photograph in black and white. Here is why chaos turns to gray noise without color, and how light, time, angle and patience can give a crowded frame a center.
-
How Black And White Erases Time
Put a portrait from 1942 beside one from 2016 and, in black and white, it is hard to tell which is older. Here is how black and white takes the date out of a photograph, and what can still give it away.
-
Color Describes the World. Black and White Interprets It.
Elliott Erwitt said color is descriptive and black and white is interpretive. Here is what that actually means, why he made much of his living in color, and why converting a photograph is not the same as interpreting it.
-
The Black and White Setting Hiding in Every Phone
The grayscale setting on our phones is usually sold as a way to cut screen time. For black and white photographers it is something better, a way to see which photographs actually hold up without their color.
-
If It Doesn’t Work in Two Tones, It Won’t Work in a Hundred
Seeing in tone gets easier when we stop trying to see every gray at once. Notan, an idea from Japanese art that was taught to American photographers a century ago, starts with just two.
-
A Centuries Old Technique For Photographers
Long before anyone pointed a camera at anything, painters were already proving that color was not required to create convincing depth, weight, or emotional force. Grisaille, the centuries old technique of painting entirely in shades of gray, has a lot to teach anyone working in black and white today.
-
The Myth of Photographic Truth
When photography was invented, it was received as something radically different from painting, a mechanical, objective record of reality rather than an interpreted one. That belief was flawed from nearly the very beginning. Here is the real history of photographic truth, and how far we have actually strayed from it.
-
The Color Tool Every Black and White Photographer Should Be Using
A color editing tool for black and white photography sounds like a contradiction. It is not. It is one of the most precise, powerful ways to expand tonal separation in a monochrome image, and it is closer to traditional darkroom craft than most photographers realize.
-
What Actually Makes an Image Feel Three Dimensional
You have probably heard the phrase 3D pop, usually attached to a claim about some specific vintage lens. The actual term is micro contrast, and it is a real, definable thing. It is also one of the more genuinely misunderstood and marketing distorted ideas in photography right now.
-
The Gap Between Tips and Better Photographs
You have read the articles. You know the rule of thirds, leading lines, golden hour, the exposure triangle, all of it, fluently. And your photographs have not improved at anywhere near the rate that volume of information would suggest they should have. Here is why that gap is not your fault, and why it will…