PERFECT IN-CAMERA MONOCHROME
While black and white conversion in software offers flexibility, creating monochrome images at the moment of exposure has its own benefits
Simple steps to achieving marvellous monochrome imagery in-camera
There’s an abundance of dedicated black and white conversion software applications that provide sophisticated options for quality colourless images. However, while shooting in colour and stripping it away later has become standard practice, it can cause problems. Conversion is not a quick method of making a dull image worth keeping, as can be the tempting frame of mind to adopt. Shooting your image with the initial intent to produce a mono shot allows you to consider tone, detail and compositional balance before the exposure is made. Once you have decided how you want the final image to look, using the scene in front of you as a reference, you can select contrast, sharpness and tone from a range of file-customisation options in your camera’s image style menu, while seeing an immediate preview. Sometimes a slight adjustment to exposure or composition can improve your tonal range, parameters which cannot be easily altered at the computer. Modern cameras often have toning filters or film simulation modes, which can be added to create unique photographs. Applying effects in the camera saves time at the processing stage, and can output print-ready images that don’t suffer from the mis-application of processing or variations in tone, induced by inconsistent colour balance between computer screens.