Dioptrick
TalkEmount All-Pro
It's been raining hard and wind is howling outside, so I thought I might use the indoor time to share some of the stuff I've learned about B&W photography.
B&W is colour-blind: (Oh really, lol?)
It wasn't until I started work as a graphic artist in the old 'cut & paste' pre-computer days that the penny dropped about how silver-halides see the world of colour. Light-sensitive chemicals used in photographic film and paper are called silver-halides. I remember being given this "magic pen" which apparently was invisible as far as our high-contrast bromide camera (look it up) was concerned. We can write notes and instructions with it and it never showed-up in the final artwork reproductions. For a while I thought its ink was made of some fancy special substance until I discovered that all it was was just a light-cyan coloured pen. Silver-halides can't see certain colours (like certain shades of light blue and yellow), and in addition silver-halides also see some colours as the exact same shade of grey (like greens and reds).
The principle here is not so much that monotone photosensitivity is colour-blind, but rather it's colour-SELECTIVE... although silver-halides used in photography will capture middle shades of grey, whereas bromide reproductions don't.
Below is a colour wheel which was converted to B&W Greyscale, and B&W high-contrast Bromide. It'll make sense of the gibberish I'm talking about.
You can ignore the bromide wheel. What's relevant to B&W photography is what you see in the Greyscale wheel.
Fast forward to the digital age:
What is amazing (for some cosmic reason) is that modern light sensitive digital sensors AND even Colour-to-B&W pixel conversions in photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop - behave similarly to silver-halides. Old-school photosensitivity is chemical whereas new-school photosensitivity is digital/electronic - but BOTH are colour blind in almost exactly the same way!
Study and remember which colours translate to the same shades of grey. Understanding this will help when interpreting if certain compositions will come out good or bad in B&W, before pressing the shutter.
Next, I'll share about how to use coloured lens filters for B&W photography... and how it relates to this.
B&W is colour-blind: (Oh really, lol?)
It wasn't until I started work as a graphic artist in the old 'cut & paste' pre-computer days that the penny dropped about how silver-halides see the world of colour. Light-sensitive chemicals used in photographic film and paper are called silver-halides. I remember being given this "magic pen" which apparently was invisible as far as our high-contrast bromide camera (look it up) was concerned. We can write notes and instructions with it and it never showed-up in the final artwork reproductions. For a while I thought its ink was made of some fancy special substance until I discovered that all it was was just a light-cyan coloured pen. Silver-halides can't see certain colours (like certain shades of light blue and yellow), and in addition silver-halides also see some colours as the exact same shade of grey (like greens and reds).
The principle here is not so much that monotone photosensitivity is colour-blind, but rather it's colour-SELECTIVE... although silver-halides used in photography will capture middle shades of grey, whereas bromide reproductions don't.
Below is a colour wheel which was converted to B&W Greyscale, and B&W high-contrast Bromide. It'll make sense of the gibberish I'm talking about.
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You can ignore the bromide wheel. What's relevant to B&W photography is what you see in the Greyscale wheel.
Fast forward to the digital age:
What is amazing (for some cosmic reason) is that modern light sensitive digital sensors AND even Colour-to-B&W pixel conversions in photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop - behave similarly to silver-halides. Old-school photosensitivity is chemical whereas new-school photosensitivity is digital/electronic - but BOTH are colour blind in almost exactly the same way!
Study and remember which colours translate to the same shades of grey. Understanding this will help when interpreting if certain compositions will come out good or bad in B&W, before pressing the shutter.
Next, I'll share about how to use coloured lens filters for B&W photography... and how it relates to this.