I used to dislike black and white photography. It seemed pretentious and useless; it was for portraits of very wrinkly old people, or still lifes of food. It seemed like an attempt to introduce drama or emotion that I never felt. Unless you were Ansel Adams shooting on silver nitrate, what was the point?

But since that time, I’ve found love for black and white. I found it in photo editing. And understanding the reasons a photographer might choose black and white helped me to appreciate the images. I guess I got there backwards, but regardless, I’m happy to appreciate a new category of photography at last. And if there are any others out there that just don’t get black and white, here are a few reasons that swayed me.

Adding drama that would look artificial in color

I encountered this situation just last weekend shooting at White Sands National Monument in Southern New Mexico. It was cloudy. White Sands is, as it sounds, a region covered with white sand dunes. Without a light source, it is monochromatic and flat. The mountains in the distance were hazy. The first image below is what the camera captured. I love the composition, but this is not a good image as-captured. It is gray and washed out.

So, I went to work in my editor. I knew this image would be flat when I took it, but I had faith that I could add life in post-processing. I pulled down the blacks, increased the contrast, and pushed the tone curve around. I added a gradient filter bringing up the exposure and contrast on the sand so it would look brighter, but so that I wouldn’t have to over-expose the sky. The second image is what I got. I hated it. The sand looked dingy, rather than the dazzling white it was in person and in the first image. The color balance for the sky and the sand would have to be different. That’s doable, but that means fiddling with masks in photoshop on a photo-by-photo basis, and then having tifs that aren’t as flexible as the RAW format I shoot in. I set my White Sands photos aside to tend to other pictures from the trip, hoping for a revelation at a later date.

And I had that revelation a few days later: black and white. I took that second picture, added a warm light black and white filter, and had to tinker only slightly to get image #3. I love image #3. The sand is still dark, but I find it plausible without the saturation of image #2.

Black and white isn’t just black and white. As a photographer, you have a choice how to map between color and b+w. You could just use brightness for that conversion, but why be restricted? Maybe you want a nice dark sky, and thus you want blue to map to a dark black and white value. Film photographers used colored glass filters to influence which colors were light or dark in the black and white rendering of the image. They had to make this choice at shooting time because the image captured in black and white. Nowadays with digital, we capture in color and can make choices in the comfort of an office chair. A warm light filter brightens the warm colors of the image and darkens the cool colors of the image.

Image #4 shows what image #3 would look like with a cool light filter (with bright cool colors and dark warm colors). In my opinion, image #3 is the obvious winner. But you can see what a difference the bw/color mapping makes. Other than the bw filter settings and an exposure adjustment to avoid overexposure, images #3 and #4 are the same. They don’t feel the same at all.

Image #1: Without any edits

Image #3: Black and white #1, using a warm light filter.

Image #4: Black and white #2, using a cool light filter.

Directing the viewer’s eye

Sometimes I like to use black and white to clarify an image. In this case, the image isn’t a disaster to edit in color, it just doesn’t need its color info.   At best, the color is irrelevant, and at worst, it can be distracting.

In the first pair of images below, I liked the different linear elements, some horizontal, some vertical; some organic, some artificial. The browns and reds and greens of this image aren’t terribly impressive, and they don’t contribute to this narrative I wanted to convey. I felt that leaving the color would convey nature as the subject rather than the abstraction I wanted to convey. So I changed image #1 to image #2. I did this edit 8 months ago. Now I look at the black and white and want to push the contrast harder on the tree; perhaps if I did this edit again I would brush some contrast in.

Image #1

Image #2

In this pair of images, again I was interested in an abstraction. I took this photo as part of a photography prompt: photographing light. The windows of a building across the street were reflecting light onto these windows. The window-vs-window aspect intrigued me. But other than the window reflection, the image was of a drab building wall in shadow and a slightly washed out sky. Not very exciting. By removing the color information, I thought the image more truly captured the “photographing light” prompt that I wished for it to convey.

Image #3

Image #4

Of course there are other reasons to edit to black and white. Sometimes it is to convey mood or to fit a theme. But the examples above are reasons that didn’t occur to me when I first started shooting. And they offer a lot of creative options that I didn’t realize either. Black and white can be dynamic and fun!

I spent my holiday weekend exploring New Mexico and Arizona. I visited four national park service sites. I played in the sand, hiked amongst stone columns, walked through fields of trees turned to sparkling stones, and looked from a volcanic plateau over a desert of color. I visited White Sands National Monument, Chiricahua National Monument, Saguaro National Park, and Petrified Forest National Park, and with the exception of Saguaro, I was struck by how little flukes of crystallography and geology birthed the places of beauty I admired.

White Sands National Monument

White Sands National Monument is located in southeast New Mexico, not too far from Roswell. The national monument is surrounded by White Sands Missile Range, which contains the Trinity Site (which by the way, looks rather dull from the road, just a plaque. There were a lot of cattle grazing nearby, amusingly). Occasionally, the monument closes because of tests on the missile range. The morning of the day we visited, an F-16 crashed in the missile range (the pilot was okay).

White Sands National Monument is made up of gypsum sand. That sand is actually why it’s a missile range. It’s brilliantly white, and thus makes a great target. Check it out on google earth, it really sticks out.

Gypsum is water soluble, so gypsum dunes are pretty rare. The White Sands dunes exist because the Tularosa Basin in which it sits has no drain. The dunes are basically a dried lake bed–a small lake does exist at the southern end of the park. In my humble opinion, gypsum kicks silica’s (normal sand) butt. The grains are very fine. They sell sleds in the gift shop, and families went sledding on the dunes. The sand doesn’t capture heat like silica sand does. And when you get sand in your mouth, as you will when sledding or when you drop your water bottle in  the sand like I did, it dissolves. Truly, the gypsum sand dunes are the closest thing I’ve ever seen to warm snow.

(Gypsum is generally just a cool mineral. Selenite is composed of gypsum. If you’re in a rock shop, find a piece to look at. Selenite has what is known as birefringence–if you set it on text and look through it, you’ll see that text twice. Gypsum also is what desert roses are made of. Selenite crystals have been found up to meters long in caves in Mexico. Gypsum is also what makes drywall. And gypsum is just calcium bonded to sulfate. Chemistry is wonderful stuff.)

The White Sands National Monument is spectacular, more spectacular than many national parks I’ve seen. The nearby Organ Mountains are beautiful too. I suspect this would be a national park, if not for the air force wanting to bomb it from time to time. It is absolutely worth a visit– but it is in southern New Mexico, so perhaps at a cooler time of day or year. On November 25th, it was a high of 75, and it was great.

Chiricahua National Monument

Chiricahua National Monument is the 14th least-visited national monument of the 114 national monuments in the country. I thought it was paradise. There aren’t many places this beautiful that you can enjoy in relative privacy. Unlike many of the little-visited national monuments in New Mexico, Chiricahua has quality paved roads all the way to and into the park. It’s only a 40 minute drive from I-10 in southeastern Arizona. If you happen to find yourself in that part of the country, Chiricahua is worth it.

The magic mineral in Chiricahua is volcanic rhyolite. Rhyolite is chemically similar to granite, but it forms differently. It cools faster at the time of formation, and therefore has smaller crystals. The rhyolite at Chiricahua formed with tension in the rock, leading to cracks called joints. Over millions of years, wind, water and plant life have worked at those cracks and led to the thousands of rhyolite pillars that fill the park. Much of the work was done in the CCC era… walking around I marveled at what hard work that much have been in this park, and yet 80 years later the park is still relatively unknown.

Chiricahua has been one of my favorite hikes yet. We did the Echo Canyon loop trail, which is chock full of great sights. You see columns up close and at a distance, with relatively little pain for a 3.3 mile trail. Several other longer trails looked like fun, and I intend to be back to check them out.

Petrified Forest National Park

Although this was the most famous of my destinations, the miner0logy for this one was the toughest to research! Petrified Forest National Park contains its eponymous petrified wood, but it’s also famous for the colorful sands of the painted desert. I found lots of information on petrified wood; it is formed by felled trees that, because they get buried for some reason, are not subject to the normal decay processes. The wood turns to agate (like those agate slices from geodes that I used to collect as a kid) and the result is beautiful colors and stone. Some of the wood is imperfectly agatized, and still contains ancient DNA, which is also cool. It’s pretty cool to think that the grassland desert of Petrified Forest was once an equatorial forest full of enormous trees. What a difference 200 million years makes!

The painted desert was harder to research. The different colors are due to different layers of rock from different eras. But I wanted to know why some were blue or red or purple or yellow! What chemicals? The internet is built by geeks of the bit variety and less the atom variety, so my struggle turned up little in the initial investigation. So, I take it as a great challenge for a future post!

Petrified Forest was a bit cold this time of year! The low overnight when we were there was 22. So I must recommend it with a tad more warmth. But the hiking was great. We did a backwoods trail by the Jasper Forest and walked along the dirt road that once brought stage coaches from the railroad station. If such a landscape feels alien to us, with TV and internet bringing us HD video of any place at a click, one thinks what a landscape felt like in 1906 when the park was designated as a national monument. Even today, it’s an open, austere place, full of ruins 200 million years old.