The Secret to Shooting Black or White Photos

Not everything in photography is black or white - let me show you the exposure trick that will make black, black and white, white

Not everything in photography is black and white and today I'm going to show you why that's the case. Hi, my name is Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop and this is Coffee Break Photography.

Well, today you can see I'm outside of the office and I'm here on a location. It's actually one of the locations I use in my Switch to Manual workshop, which is aimed at beginner photographers. And I'm going to show you something that you may not have quite understood about exposure, that sometimes when you set your light meter to zero, or if you're shooting automatic, if you're just pressing the button, you're not always going to get the photograph that you think you're going to get. And I'll show you that by taking a picture of this door behind me. Let me take the picture and I'll show you what the problem is.

So you can see on my light meter that the light meter is set to zero and that's using a shutter speed of two hundredth of a second, an aperture of f5.6 and an ISO of 1,250. So I'm going to press the button and then let's have a look at the photograph.

We can see the photograph that the door that's behind me, which is clearly black, isn't black. It's grey. And the reason why it's grey is because of a photographer called Ansel Adams. And I'm sure a lot of people watching this video today will know exactly who Ansel Adams is. He was a photographer who worked in the national parks of America, primarily from 1930 to 1950, when he died in 1984. And the reason why the door looks grey is because of Ansel Adams. He created a system called the zone system.

So let's imagine you've got black on one side, you've got white on the other side. Ansel Adams created eleven zones between black and white. Different shades of grey going from light grey all the way through to dark grey and eventually black and white at the ends. And what he did is when he was taking his photographs, he made sure that there was something in all the eleven zones. in the photograph. And he almost did it like a bell shape if you like. Yes, the mid-tones had most of the image and then the edges had just a little bit. And so we get photographs like these from Ansel Adams and you can see why people thought he was one of the best photographers in the world.

After a while though, Camera Manufacturers started thinking about this zone system that he was doing. They thought well we could use some of the principles to help our photos. So what they did is they thought the zone which is halfway between black and white, this zone 5 is neutral gray. They said neutral gray happens a lot. Let's look around this entire location that we're in. You can see there's lots and lots of gray. And they thought if we can tell the camera what neutral gray should look like and then we could tell that camera how to identify neutral gray. It could then tell the photographer the settings you're using right now either make that neutral gray too bright or too dark. And then we can create an auto exposure system and that's similar to what happens today.

So in principle we are still using grey is too bright or too dark. Now that's fine most of the pictures we take have got some grey in it just like this location here but it's not fine when we don't have grey just like this black door and so if there's no grey in the image the camera then does another set of logic and the next set of logic says if I can't see grey whatever the closest thing to grey is I'm going to call grey and the closest thing to grey in this picture is black so our black has now become grey

The way we fix this is by changing our exposure and knowing we're changing our exposure on purpose. So let's retake the photograph and I'll describe to you what I'm doing. Okay so this time instead of having the exposure at zero we can see with the same settings 1,250 ISO I'm going to half the ISO I'm going to set that down to 640 so you can see now the light meter is at minus one.

If I retake the image now we can see that we've now got black in the door rather than that grey colour. So anytime you're photographing something which is mainly black you need to underexpose by one stop. It's between one and two stops in practice. Today it's quite a cloudy overcast day here in Edinburgh so one stop tends to work well. If the ambient light so the the light outside of what we're taking is a bit brighter it's usually better to underexpose by slightly more so for a bright sunny day you might need to expose by about two stops inside of there. But the principle is anytime you're photographing something which is mainly black we're going to underexpose by between one and two stops. So I guess that asks the question what happens when it's snowed and everything is white? What do we do then? Well let's go and try.

Okay so here we are just around the corner. I’ve got a really nice white wall inside in front of me. I'm going to shoot quite an abstract image so let's take the picture first of all and you can see the correct settings for this picture is with the shutter speed at 800th of a second. Actually, I’ll change should speed to 640. The lights changing ever so slightly as we go in and out of cloud, so I'm going to keep it at 640th of a second, f5.6 aperture, ISO 100. Take the shot and we can see that we've got a grey wall rather than a white wall, but this time we need to reverse what happens. Instead of underexposing by one stop as we did with a black subject, we need to overexpose by one stop. And if you think about the logic, the camera can't see grey, the closest thing to grey this time is white. So in order to make the white or what's now become grey white, we overexpose by one stop. So let's do that. You can see the light’s changed very slightly, so I'm going to take the shutter speed down to 400th of a second, which gets the light meter set to plus one. Retake the image and now we can see we've got a proper white wall rather than the grey white wall we had in the first picture. So any time you photograph something which is mainly black, you need to underexpose by around one stop. And if it's mainly white, you need to overexpose by one stop. So hopefully with this knowledge now, you'll be able to take really nice snow pictures in about four or five months time when we start to see snow again.

Well, if you enjoyed this video, it would be great if you'd like it and share it by clicking on the thumbs up button below the video. That way, a few more people get to see it. You can also subscribe to the channel by clicking on this button down here. I send out a newsletter to my subscribers and if you'd like to sign up, just click on this QR code up here. My name is Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop and this has been Coffee Break Photography. See you next time!