I used to not care very much for black and white photography simply because I wanted to photograph what I saw, and the world was in color. When I looked at a landscape, I saw the greens, the yellows, the reds, and the oranges. I didn’t see, nor did I want to think about, shades of gray.
Over the years, though, I have grown more fond and, dare I say, appreciative of black and white photography. I have seen many black and white photographs that just wouldn’t seem to work well in color, at least when I try to envision them in my mind as color. Black and white images seem timeless, and they can provide a mood that is not always easy to convey in a color photograph.
I first began to appreciate black and white photography with this image of the Cape St. George Light on St. George Island, Florida. It was in 2011, and I, of course, had photographed it in color. After all, that was how I saw it. I processed the file and generally liked the result – the lighthouse standing tall and proud in the center of the frame, the lightkeeper’s house on the edge, and the billowing storm clouds in the sky.
But, something was missing. When I think of a lighthouse, I think of storms and crashing waves. I think of danger, tension, and apprehension. The image had none of that. Rather, it looked like a nice afternoon at the beach. Thinking about it for a while, I finally had my “what if” moment. What if I converted the color image to a black and white image?
So, I clicked the button to convert it to black and white. Instantly, I realized I was onto something, but it still wasn’t quite where I wanted it to be. So, I spent more time with it: increasing the highlights, lowering the shadows; basically, enhancing the contrast of the image.
Finishing with the contrast adjustments, I sat back and assessed the picture. The adjustments had significantly improved the image, and it was getting closer to what I had in mind. But, there was still something more that needed to be done, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on what that something was.
As I thought about it, it occurred to me that, of all the old black and white photographs I had ever seen, nearly every one had visible film grain. My image didn’t have that. It simply looked too clean. To address this situation, I opened the file in Photoshop and added digital noise to the image.
I don’t remember how much noise I added, but it ended up being quite a bit. My thought process was that, had this photograph been made in the 1800s in the same lighting conditions I had, there would have probably been a lot of graininess in the picture, so I wanted to recreate that in my photograph. To do that, I had to dial up the noise.
The result was exactly what I had in mind.