Did you know?

...you can shoot digital photos in black and white?

4th - December - 2001
By: Ian Burley

I spotted a question on a newsgroup discussion board about whether a digital camera could be used for black and white photography. The answer is, of course, a resounding yes!

Some digital cameras have a monochrome mode, but my suggestion is that you should shoot in colour as normal and make the image mono later, using an image editing package, such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photo-Paint, MGI PhotoSuite, etc.

I recently had a bit of fun with some mono shooting, using an Olympus C-4040Z. I was privileged to attend an exhibition of mono prints shot by the British photojournalist, Nick Danziger, featured in his latest book: ‘The British’. Danziger, who is sponsored by Olympus and uses OM-system SLRs, specialises in mono film photography, often using very fast film that delivers an atmospheric grainy and contrasty effect that lends itself very well to his ‘moments in a life’ captured style of picture taking. Here are some thumbnail examples from his book:
 

Below is Nick Danziger chatting to another journalist at the venue: ‘The Old Bank of England’ Pub, in the City of London (London’s financial district) where a limited exhibition of his pictures was being held. I converted the image to a mono version - sort of ‘Danziger-style’ - though, in no way do I claim to have anywhere near his talents!

Here, I’ve cropped the image and sharpened it.

I happened to be using Photoshop Elements for this, but most similar packages offer the same ‘mode’ commands for converting the image from full colour to, in this case, 256 level grey-scale.

 then lightened both contrast and brightness for the optimum ambience (a personal thing!) and then added some subtle noise to simulate grain, using the gaussian noise function in Elements.

It’s not a masterpiece, but it gave me a lot of personal satisaction and serves to show that you can have a lot of fun with digital images - in black and white.
 

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