Black and White Thoughts

Today’s Post by Mark Toal

Lately whenever I pick up my camera I change it to black and white and often the 1:1 square format. Over the winter, I was scanning old black and white negatives from my first years as a photographer and I was struck by how b&w captures the feeling in an image better than color.

I came across a Facebook page called “Old Photographs” that mostly has creative old black and white images. I noticed how much more the images show off the buildings, cars, etc. without the distraction of color. Also, when I import photos into Instagram they are cropped to square unless I choose otherwise. I find that I frequently like the square image better even if I shot is as a horizontal.

Black and White works great with a Mirrorless camera since you see the scene in b&w and square on the rear-mounted LCD and the electronic viewfinder. If you set your camera to just shoot JPEGs your file will be only b/w. If you shoot in JPEG+RAW your jpg JPEGs will be black and white and the RAW file will be in color.

Try setting your camera to black and white or as most cameras refer to it “Monochrome” and see how different the world looks.

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