The Creativity Paradox: Black and White Photography

Thursday, June 18, 2015

In the Zone

"Ansel Adams and camera" by photo by J. Malcolm Greany

Ansel Adams is probably the world's best known landscape photographer. Working mostly with black and white film and a medium format camera, his landscapes of the Western United States, particularly the Yosemite area, have become iconic for photographic perfection.

Adams first visited Yosemite in 1916 with his family and captured his first photographs of the area on a Kodak Brownie that was a gift from his Father. He returned to the park the following year with a better camera and a tripod.

While in Yosemite, Adams met Virginia Best, whose family owned Best's Studio in the park. The couple married in 1928 and inherited the studio upon her Father's death in 1935. They operated the studio until 1971. The studio is now the Ansel Adams Gallery.


El Capitan and Merced River by Ansel Adams

To ensure the best possible exposure for each photograph, Adams and his colleague Fred Sharp codified the Zone System which applies sensitometric methods to calculate a camera's aperture and shutter settings. To use the system, a photographer meters the light reflected from different elements in the scene and adjusts the exposure based upon the photographers knowledge of the desired brightness of the object being metered. The Zone System assigns numbers from 0 through 10to different brightness values, with 0 representing black, 5 middle gray, and 10 pure white. The difference between the zones represent one stop of exposure on a camera's aperture or shutter speed settings.

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Wide and Wonderful
Wyoming in 3D
The Beautiful Rio Grande Gorge

Half Dome and the Merced River by Ansel Adams

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Recreating Classic Black and White

Early Eastman Kodak Camera

It has been 120 years since the Eastman Kodak Company introduced the first consumer cameras and film. For the first half of that period, most consumer photography was limited to black and white. Classic black and white prints have a crisp, clear quality that is seldom matched by contemporary printing methods.

A classic black and white photographic print is produced by exposing an image on a sheet of paper coated with a light-sensitive silver halide emulsion. Where light reaches the silver halide crystals, they are converted to metallic silver. Chemical processing then develops the metallic silver into the dark areas of the print and washes the unconverted silver halide away. The silver that remains in the image generates the crisp image that we expect in classic black and white prints.

In the 1960s, consumers began capturing images on color film and receiving color prints from their labs. While the color photographic process is also based upon exposure of silver halide into metallic silver, the final result is different. Color print processing activates color dyes that are coupled with the silver. Once the dyes are activated, the silver is washed completely out of the color print. Initially, the dyes in color prints were not very stable which is why color prints from the 1960s and 70s are often faded and off-color.

In the early years of color photography, consumer labs offered both color and black and white processing. During the 1990s however, black and white had become such a niche product that many consumer labs began printing black and white images using color materials. Now, instead of one layer of crisp metallic silver, the black and white image was reproduced using cyan, magenta and yellow dye. The black areas were seldom black.

I am excited about a new method for printing wall decor that recreates the crisp clear quality of a classic black and white print. The metal prints offered by Black River Imaging and other professional labs are made with black ink and the metallic background brings out the timeless character of black and white photography.