Three talented photographers share the secrets of a dramatic monotone landscape
Kimmerle, who usually confines his edits to dodging and burning, notes that this was an unusual level of manipulation. “Working digitally offers far greater control and many more options for interpretation than can be found in a standard darkroom, especially for black-and-white work,” he says. “Sadly, many people fall victim to the traps of the power of post-processing. They don’t know when or how to hold back, to be subtle. They do too much because they can, relying on digital tricks and gimmicks that mask an image rather than enhance it.”
Kimmerle makes landscape images exclusively in black-and-white, he says, for two reasons. “The first is that I am far more interested in an object’s form and texture than I am its color,” he says. “Those traits are more powerful, more emotional, than an object’s tint and hue. The other reason is that I am a firm believer that creative photography is a two-step process: the creation of the image, and the presentation of the print. Or, to quote Ansel Adams, ‘The negative is the score, and the print the performance.’”
Two Very Different Hats
To peruse the website of Chris Clor, you might get the idea that he’s two different photographers. His commercial work in color for corporate clients tends toward wildly imaginative (some might say over-the-top) composites clearly not meant to represent reality. His black-and-white landscapes, such as his photograph of the Isle of Skye, are highly classical, even austere. “Since much of the black-and-white subject matter I shoot is landscape or cityscape, I have adopted a more straightforward approach to the photography, prefering almost no manipulation,” he tells us. “Something about black-and-white demands a bit more photographic realism, since at its core it is already an abstraction—we see in color.”
For the Skye image, Clor used his Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II and 24–70mm f/2.8L Canon EF lens for an exposure of 1/200 sec at f/5.6, ISO 100. After going grayscale, he did “minimal dodging and burning, a bit of noise reduction in the sky, and sharpening.”
Clor is currently using very different gear. “I prefer my Sony NEX-7 paired with a bucketful of old Olympus OM lenses I own from my very first real camera, an Olympus OM-1,” he says. “These are lenses that are around 30 years old, and in my book, outperform the modern lenses.”
Thinking in B&W
Our monochrome masters agree: to hone your b&w skills, just do it. A lot. “You need to put the hours and miles in,” Clor says. “I would suggest planning a photographic excursion to a place that interests you—not a vacation with the kids where you work in some shooting, but a trip devoted to photography.”
“To become better at working in black-and-white, I think it is important to immerse yourself in it completely, training yourself to see the world as it looks in compositions of black, white and gray,” Fokos says. He suggests capturing images simultaneously in RAW and monochrome JPEG to view the image on the LCD in b&w.
“The biggest mistake made by those new to black-and-white is to rely too heavily on differences in color rather than differences in luminosity, or brightness,” Kimmerle says. “Radically different colors may appear, in a black-and-white image, as the same shade of gray. Seeing in black-and-white is a skill that must be learned by doing.”
