Black and white landscape photography
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Sometimes colour gets in the way.
Removing colour can give a photographer greater control over guiding the viewer’s eye, as well as enhancing mood.
It’s a powerful tool when used selectively on the right images, but not all pictures are suitable for this effect.
Deciding what photos will benefit can be a bit trial and error, as well as instinctive. Try it on your archive images and see what happens!
It would be a very rare event where I would convert a classic sunset or sunrise to black and white, and that is because those pictures are about the colour, I would never convert a photo if I felt that something important about that image would be lost. And converting for the sake of it is wrong in my book.
If you want something toned down, then you need to change your subject matter.
None of the above images are golden hour photos. But the black and white conversions injects back into the image the impact that I saw when I took the picture.
The black and white processing technique that I used here emphasises the depth that is built into the composition
The depth in each of these comes from the fact that they depict roads drifting off into the distance.
Put together like this they have quite an impact. But they would have none if you saw the originals all placed together.
I use black and white and heavy vignetting to emphasise depth. I also use black and white to emphasise elements that in colour would blend in silently to their surroundings.
That applies to the top left image of the vapour trail that looks like a comet falling to earth. Barely visible in colour, the horizon, sun and vapour trail take over the photo with this conversion
That’s what I saw when I took the image, and that’s what I see after the black and white conversion.
