Portrait | Black and White Photography
© 2010 Wazari Wazir | My Son Playing With Puddle | Langkawi Kedah
Some of you might not call this a black and white photograph but just a greyscale photograph. It doesn’t have that kind of deep solid black, just a shade of grey, you are right, this is not super deep rich black and white but that is not my point of this article. I know how to get a deep rich black and white but for this image I prefer it to be like this, a lighter version of black and white.
I get a lot of emails asking me, how to know whether some picture will look good in black and white or not, very hard for me to answer that kind of a question, just because we know how to edit in black and white, it doesn’t mean that all picture will turn out great in black and white, some picture do look great in colors and should be left like that. Sometimes the colors is among the content of the picture, like fashion show for an example, we need to know the colors of the fabrics, the textile in order for some people to make a buying decision unless you shoot for fun without having any intention to sell that “fashion” then you are free to do whatever you want with your picture.
Colors does play an important role in photography we can enhance mood of happiness, joy or sorrow through the colors that we choose. Bright colorful colors usually suitable to tell a mood of happiness, red for bravery, attention, strong, green colors for nature, yellow for warmth and suitable for portrait or family photograph.
There are a lot of articles on the internet about what make good black and white, few tips and tricks here and there. Sometimes it depend on our intentions, what we want to say about our photograph, what is our subject matters here, what do we want to tell in our picture, what our picture is all about. For my son picture above, I want the viewer to focus more on my son, not the environment, my main subject here is my son. I want the viewer to go straight to my son mood, expression, feels his excitement playing with the puddle there.
Maybe it is hard for strangers to feels like what I’m feeling here because it is my son but I feels more in touch with the picture of my son here in B/W than if I look at the original color picture. The colors of the green and yellow turtle toy on my son right hand and the orange color of my son T-shirt to me is pose as a distraction. So I want to take away the element of distraction here, so that I can get in touch with my subject better.
Ted Grant say it best, “When you photograph people in colour you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in B&W, you photograph their souls!”. I think that quote is good enough to summarize my intention here, why I choose to share my picture here in Black and White even though some of you might say, it is just a shade of grey.
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