MONOCHROME MODES
Black & white made easy
Colour photography is wonderful, but now is the time to start exploring black, white and all the greys in between – and the only kit you need is your digital camera and the help of mono master Will Cheung
Digital capture has made the journey to black & white photography totally painless. No need for coloured filters, chemicals or even film! All you have to do is select the monochrome picture style for lovely out-of-camera mono pictures, and you don’t even have to switch on the computer.
But if shooting awesome monochrome pictures is that easy, you are probably wondering why we have allocated four pages to the subject. Well, it’s time to come clean and admit that while shooting monochrome is easy, to make the most of the medium you have to get your brain out of first gear.
Which format?
Let’s kick off with camera format. Set the camera to shoot raw, select monochrome and take a shot. The preview image will be in black & white and when you get the file into the computer it can still look mono depending on the software, but it’s a full data raw so you can go full colour if you want. The only standard cameras that shoot monochrome raws are the dedicated black & white cameras from Leica and Pentax.
Repeat the process with JPEG only set, and the result is black & white, as you’d expect, but now you can’t go to colour. All the raw data was discarded when the JPEG was written to the memory card, but the upside is that the file is ready to be printed, shared and stored as a mono image with no further editing work needed.
So, for the ultimate flexibility on your mono journey, set the camera up to shoot both formats. The raw file gives the ultimate editing flexibility especially with white balance, shadow and highlight recovery and you can go colour or mono, while the JPEG is a lovely monochrome ready to share and use out of camera. There is no real downside to this belts and braces approach except that you eat up memory, but there are more upsides.
ALL IMAGES © WILL CHEUNG
Menu matters
Just selecting monochrome mode and both file formats is the beginning. JPEG files are much smaller and the opportunity to edit is very limited, and that means you have to get it as right as possible at the time of capture. This is imperative in colour but it helps in mono shooting too. This is why you must dig into the camera menu to explore the options on o
