Figure 6-53: B&W can save a shot that has poor lighting. Also, most non-photographers tend to regard Black-and-white shots as being more “artistic”. (These are the same people who think that a big and heavy camera must take better pictures.)
Once upon a time (back in the days of film) I was shooting a wedding, and the couple requested that I shoot black-and-white in my famous wedding photojournalism style.
Figure 6-53: B&W can save a shot that has poor lighting. Also, most non-photographers tend to regard Black-and-white shots as being more “artistic”. (These are the same people who think that a big and heavy camera must take better pictures.) |
“Sure!” I said, “but it would probably be much easier and cheaper to shoot everything in color, and then just convert selected pictures to B&W in the computer.”
“Absolutely not!” the bride insisted. “Black-and-white must be black-and-white from start to finish!” (And trust me, being a reformed wedding photographer, you do not want to argue with a bride!)
The engineer in me, who has learned that the results are more important than the process, acquiesced to this very common mode of thinking in the art world, where process is just as important (or perhaps more so) than the results. (This is why darkroom-processed fiber-based prints are allowed in art galleries, but inkjet prints containing the same quality image are not. Go figure.)
Rightly or wrongly, this is the perception that we all must live with. And while Sony graced your camera with a B&W and Sepia mode to save you the trouble of creating the B&W image on your computer, I’ll bet it could also be used for wedding couples with a degree in art. (B&W and Sepia mode are two of the Image Styles described a couple of sections ago.)
TIP: B&W mode isn’t just a simple desaturation. Below is an image I took in B&W mode, plus the Lightroom adjustments I had to make to make the RAW file (taken at the same time) look the same as what came out of the camera. A little extra contrast on the curves, a slightly non-standard conversion of the colors to greyscale.
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B/W mode has other practical applications too. Besides taking pictures which others perceive as being more artistic, it can also save you from RBL (Really Bad Light) in some circumstances. For example, Figure 6-53 is a shot of a Chinese boy on his father’s shoulders. The child is backlit, with little direct light hitting the boy’s face. This light is just awful, but when shot in B&W mode the poor lighting hardly gets noticed.
Want the best of both worlds? Earlier in the book I mentioned that if you shoot in B/W or Sepia mode, then the color is gone forever and it can’t be recovered. UNLESS, that is, you choose MENU --> 
1 --> Quality --> RAW & JPEG, in which case the camera will record one color and one B&W image for each picture you take. Kind of like a safety net! RAW and JPEG are all covered in Chapter 15.
