Seeing in Black and White

Black and white is not color photography with the color removed. It is a different language, and learning to speak it means learning to see the world in tones rather than hues. This is the most important perceptual skill you will build as a black-and-white photographer, and it changes how you walk through a city. Once you see in tone, you cannot unsee it.

Translate color to tone

Every color, when converted to black and white, becomes a shade of grey, and the question is which shade. A red and a green that look completely different in color can become the exact same grey in monochrome, and suddenly a scene that was vivid becomes flat and confusing. Conversely, two colors that seemed similar can separate into bright white and deep black. The black-and-white photographer learns to predict this translation: to look at a colored scene and imagine the greys.

A practical aid: shooting with the GR's Hi-Contrast Black and White JPEG profile shows you the translation in real time. Leave it on and your eye learns the mapping faster than any amount of theory.

Tonal contrast beats color contrast

In color, you can separate your subject from the background by color alone, a red coat against a grey street. In black and white that red coat might merge into the grey. So monochrome relies on tonal contrast: light against dark. Your subject reads when it is brighter or darker than what surrounds it, not when it is a different color. This is why you hunt for light: a figure lit by a shaft of sun against a shadowed wall separates beautifully in black and white, while the same figure in flat even light disappears.

What works in black and white

Certain things sing in monochrome:

Directional light, raking across a surface, carving out texture and shadow.

Deep shadows, which become rich graphic blacks anchoring the frame.

Graphic architecture, strong shapes, arches, columns, geometry, which black and white renders as pure form.

Texture, rough stone, peeling paint, wet pavement, which tonal rendering emphasizes.

Silhouettes, a dark shape against a bright background, the purest tonal statement.

Bologna is full of all of these: the porticoes are graphic architecture, the brick and stone are texture, the contrast of sunlit street and shadowed arcade is directional light.

What fights black and white

Some scenes depend on color harmony to work, a sunset's gradient of warm hues, a market stall's riot of produce colors, autumn leaves. Strip the color and the whole point collapses into similar greys. Learn to recognize these scenes and either shoot them in color, your U3 mode, or find the tonal structure hiding within them. Not every scene wants to be black and white, and forcing it produces muddy, pointless frames.

Crushed blacks versus open shadows

There are two philosophies of black-and-white shadow. Crushed blacks, where the darkest areas go to pure, detail-less black, give drama, mystery, and graphic punch. This is the world of Mario Giacomelli, whose blacks are absolute, and of Daido Moriyama, whose high-contrast frames crush everything to essentials. Open shadows, where you retain detail throughout the tonal range, give a softer, more documentary, more classical look, the world of the humanist photographers. Neither is right. Choose per image. The high-contrast, crushed-black look suits hard urban light; the open-shadow look suits softer, narrative scenes.

Grain as a choice

Grain, the speckled texture from high ISO or from film, is part of the black-and-white vocabulary. In Giacomelli and Moriyama it is heavy and expressive, part of the rawness. In Cartier-Bresson it is fine and almost invisible. On the GR IV you control grain through ISO and through the contrast profile. Decide whether a given image wants the gritty energy of grain or the clean smoothness of low ISO. It is a creative dial, not a defect.

Bologna's particular gift

Here is something specific to your new city. Bologna is famous for its color, the red brick, the warm ochre and terracotta of its buildings, La Rossa, the red one. In color, that warmth is the city's signature. But in black and white, all those warm reds, oranges, and ochres become a family of rich middle greys, and Bologna becomes a study in mid-tones, subtle gradations of grey punctuated by the deep shadow of the porticoes and the bright sky above. Learning to photograph Bologna in black and white means learning to find structure and contrast within that warm mid-tone world: the dark arch against the lit street, the silhouette in the bright doorway, the texture of old plaster. It is a wonderful tonal education, a whole city pitched in the middle of the scale, asking you to find the lights and darks within it.

How to practice

Walk for an hour and, before raising the camera, name the tones: that wall is a light grey, that doorway is near-black, that shirt will go to white. Then shoot and check yourself against the monochrome JPEG. Within weeks you will see the grey world laid over the color one, automatically, all the time. That is what it means to see in black and white.