Traditional Culture Encyclopedia - Photography major - How to take black and white photography?

How to take black and white photography?

Using black and white tones can fully express the potential of images, and some are difficult to express with color tones. "Indeed, Louis castaneda spoke the voice of many black and white photographers.

I've always had a soft spot for black and white photography. I prefer the abstraction and simplicity of black and white, and I prefer to experience the fun of completely independent quality control in the process of shooting and making black and white images. Compared with color photography, black-and-white photography only uses three tones of black, white and gray to restore the subject. Therefore, its quality control is particularly important, and any loss in quality will greatly reduce the attractiveness of black and white photos. The author believes that in high-quality black and white photography, we must pay attention to the following aspects.

1. Select high-quality equipment. The influence of high-quality equipment on the quality of black-and-white images is self-evident. Everyone knows that "if a worker wants to do a good job, he must sharpen his tools first", but the important thing is whether he will stick to your choice principle in the face of the high price of high-quality equipment.

2. Choose the right movie. Film is the carrier of images, and its quality directly affects the quality of images. As far as film sensitivity is concerned, because film sensitivity has a certain internal relationship with film's performance such as contrast, latitude, granularity, resolution, haze and preservation, low-sensitivity films have obvious advantages in granularity, resolution and haze, so try to choose low-sensitivity films. As for the brand of film, whether to choose Kodak, Yi Erfu, Fuji, Agfa or Konica is a matter of "different opinions". Photographers can make a decision according to their personal preferences and the characteristics of the subject.

3. Use light creatively. Light has two basic functions in photography: one is to make the film sensitive; The second is to make the subject produce different shapes, colors and texture effects. In black and white photography, light is both an energy and a strength. You must know it well to control the shape, texture, tone and artistic conception of the photo. Creative use of light will make ordinary subjects have extraordinary effects!

4. Perfect timbre performance. Tone is as important to black and white photography as tone is to music. Tone has a strong emotional expression, and the lightness or dullness, roughness or delicacy, lightness or gloom of black-and-white photographic works are often caused by the tone effect of the picture. In timbre control, learning to imagine is the most important. In black and white photography, any color is abstracted into three tones: black, white and gray. In the process of abstraction, if you don't give full play to your imagination, there is no way to control and express your tone. Of course, for the expression of hue, we should also take necessary technical measures, such as the choice of light, intentional overexposure or underexposure, and the use of filters, which can play a role in adjusting hue.

5. Make good use of the filter. Because the black-and-white photographic filter absorbs and passes different colors of light, it can effectively improve the contrast and tone of the image and better represent the level of the subject. In the choice of filter screen, we must first choose high-quality filter screen. Because the filter, like the lens, is directly related to the imaging quality. The combination of inferior filters and high-quality lenses is simply a waste of expensive high-quality lenses! Second, don't let the filters overlap too much. The overlapping of multiple filters will cause diffuse reflection of light passing through the filters, which will affect the clarity and contrast of the image.

6. Correct exposure. When we talk about the exposure of black and white photography, we will naturally think of the "regional exposure" theory founded by ansel adams, a famous American landscape photographer. Indeed, the theory of "regional exposure" has been regarded as the essence of black-and-white photography by black-and-white photographers for decades, but its complicated description and operation are often prohibitive. In fact, to achieve the correct exposure, it is nothing more than a reasonable imagination of the tone of the subject and a reasonable correction of the metering value according to the metering principle of various exposure meters.

⒎ Good clarity and granularity. Clarity and granularity are the most basic elements of black-and-white picture quality, which directly affect the details and texture of the picture. To improve the definition of photos, we should start with the selection of lens and film, the accuracy of focusing, the stability of camera exposure, the use of large depth of field and so on. As for the granularity of photos, we should pay attention to the selection and control of film and photographic paper types, exposure and development.

⒏ Strict darkroom flushing control. No matter how carefully the shooting is controlled, if there is no rigorous post-processing, it is still impossible to obtain high-quality images; One of the pleasures of black-and-white photography is to experience the control of black-and-white images in a darkroom. The ancestors even said, "What about photography if you don't go into the darkroom?" In the process of developing and making black-and-white images, we must carefully select chemicals and photographic paper suitable for film characteristics, strictly control temperature, stirring frequency and contrast, and adopt shading technology to improve the local tone and gradation of images. Even, we can depict a mental image that cannot be depicted in the original film through some special effects (such as nesting and overlapping), as American photographer Jerry Youseman said: "Although the darkroom can isolate me from the outside world,

Of course, it should be noted that although technical control is very important for black and white photography, it is not the whole purpose of black and white photography. Without observation, imagination and emotion, black-and-white photography cannot be called black-and-white photography. Black-and-white photography is a synthesis of feeling, imagination and control, in which technical control is just a key to open the door to miracles for you.