The Power of Black and White in Nature and Landscape Photography

Shooting for Contrast

Find and use three key contrasts to define your black-and-white image

So much of photography is in some way about contrast. Contrast helps define and structure a photo so that the composition communicates clearly and is understandable for a viewer.

Frequently, we use color as the contrast for a color photo. That is not as obvious as it seems. The contrasts that work for black and white illustrated in this chapter also work for color. However, color contrasts, such as the obvious color difference between red and green, do not work in black-and-white. Yet, as noted in the last chapter, strong color contrasts can deceive photographers into thinking that the pictorial elements in a photo still work in black-and-white even though, ...