Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“Everything always looked better in black and white. Everything always looked as if it were the first time; there’s always more people in a black and white photograph.” – Jack White
My friend Barry Staver periodically sends out marketing mailings to his clients and potential clients and recently, to get their attention, one of his postcards featured black and white images. Why? It got people’s attention.
Back in the film days when Mary and I owned ourthan not studio, the first question we asked a client about any assignment was if they needed black and white or color photography because the price of black and white film and processing was different than color and we billed on a time and (marked up) materials basis.
More often that not the clients wanted black and white images because they would be used in print, either a magazine or other publication and B&W was cheaper to reproduce back in those day, Nowadays a commercial assignment is more often going to require images to be featured in social media or a client’s website, so color is the order of the day. But today’s DSLRs or mirrorless cameras can easily shoot color or color and black & white—even at the same time—using my favorite RAW+JPEG approach.
How I Made this Photo: To illuminate the underneath of this Not-a-Monster truck above, I held the camera upside down. This position aims the attached 420EX speedlight—I think, no EXIF data for flashes— underneath the vehicle allowing it to illuminate the truck’s underside. I use this technique all the time, especially at car shows and with cameras that have built-in flashes (because it’s easier to accomplish), with vehicles that have chromed or highly detailed undercarriages.
The camera used for this shot was a Canon EOS 5D Mark I with a EF28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM lens at 30mm. The exposure was 1/200 sec at f6.3 and ISO 160. A The camera’s attached flash was fired for under chassis fill as described above.
Nowadays, creating black and white or monochrome images is a creative choice and not one that’s being driven by a financial imperative. So all of a sudden you have options: My friend, Cliff Lawson, one of the best high school senior photographers in the Rocky Mountain West, often presents black and white portrait images to his clients, the student’s parents, and their response is almost universally positive because the image is different.
You can think differently too and the next time you make a photograph, whether it’s a portrait or a picture of a car, try processing your color JPEG or RAW file using any of the many black and white conversion tools that are available, such as Silver Efex that I used for the above images.
My book Creative Digital Monochrome Effects is available from Amazon with new copies at $11.46 with used copies starting at a little more than six bucks, as I write this. There’s no Kindle version available, sorry.