I have recently wanted to challenge my photography a bit, and due to my health I have not been able to get out as much, so when I was ok for one afternoon I went to a local nature reserve mainly for a walk, but to try and get some photos. I thought instead of my normal types of landscape photography I would only shoot in black and white. Watch the video below.
I use a Panasonic G80 (G85) or G100 micro four thirds camera’s and like most cameras you have in built filters, in the Panasonic for black and white you have four filters they are monochrome, dynamic monochrome, rough monochrome, silky monochrome. These filters are added to the jpeg files. Though if you have your camera set to save the jpeg as well as the raw files, you then do have access the original raw file and being a raw file has the colour information, so you can then edit these when downloaded to your pc.
In this instance I was only going on what the image would look like using in the inbuilt filters, so this made me think about the composition, shadows and highlights differently. I was only out for about an 1.5hrs, so didn’t go that far but did find a few compositions that I think worked well with just using mono. One personally I liked was there was a kind of archway from trees either side of a path, and some close up on a tree log.
This was a fun little experiment even though wasn’t the best conditions. So try this for yourself just shooting in mono, as it make you see things differently which can be a challenge. Most of the time I forget that you have filters / effects in camera, as normally just edit once back on pc, now yes you can change your photos into mono using photoshop, lightroom, acdsee etc, but converting from colour to mono after the fact sometimes dosnt give the best results.
You can see how I got by watching the video above to see how I got on, also below are the photos I took these are straight out of camera with no post-processing, if you want to see more videos like this please subscribe to me on YouTube
