Today, I'm up at a nearby park here in the East Bay hills of the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s a great place to get away, and see some nature and it didn't take that long to get there. It’s just a simple process of grabbing the camera, one lens and going out to park and doing a little shooting.

This project is going to be a little bit different than the rest, since I’m not looking for a particular wildlife subject or landscape feature. Today, I’m shooting in black and white.

You know, when you're out looking subjects to shoot, everything is fair game, but you kind of have to think in terms of black and white, you can't just shoot like you normally would because you no longer have color to help the viewer absorb that image. In black and white, you're looking for shadows, looking for light, you're looking for angles of light, and you're looking for textures.

We’re looking for lots of different things that are going to make our photographs stand out. Remember for your final images, for this shoot, we’re working in black and white.

The most important aspect of this kind of shooting is in each image, you will need a true black and a true white – to make it indeed a black and white image.

Since it’s getting a little windy out here, wind is not a friend of audio recording, I’ll head back to my studio to talk a little more on how I got started in Black and White photography.

My first introduction to black and white was also my first introduction photography and that was through my dad. He had converted a walk-in closet; it was actually a closet in my bedroom into a fully functional darkroom.

He put in the plumbing, electricity, a small sink and a counter that held the enlarger. In retrospect, it was pretty cool.

He would go in there from time to time. I never knew what he was doing but we were told never to open the door without knocking first and frankly, I never really paid much of attention.

I was about eight years old and I started thinking, what IS he doing in there? So one day I asked him, and he responded with a, “Hey, why don’t you come in and watch.”

The process in those days with film was you would take your camera and his case he was using a 35mm rangefinder camera, he would throw in a roll of 35 millimeter Black and white film, and shoot away.

When he was done, he’d bring it in the darkroom, roll it onto a special roller. This part was done in total darkness, I mean total darkness, you couldn’t see a thing, So everything had to be laid out just so as you would fumble around in the blackness. He’d feel for a pair of pliers to pry open the film canister and gently pull the film out. Then he would fumble for the reel that he would roll the film onto, and then close the roller inside of a small light proof tank. This rolling of film was a little tricky so he would practice with the lights on with an old roll of film that he didn’t care about to get proficient at it before turning off the lights and doing all of this in total darkness.

Once the film was inside the closed tank, it was protected from the light and then he would turn the lights back on and process it. He’d pour in a series of chemicals that were all precisely mixed, measured and heated to the proper temperature.

Each of these chemicals were in the tank for a determined length of time.

First was water to get the film wet, then the developer. The developer chemical interacted with the sliver halides on the emulsion of the film to reveal everything that was exposed to light. It worked on all the levels of gray in a black and white image, revealing the photograph or essentially the negative.

If you left the developer chemical in the tank too long, or if it was too hot, it would remove all the sliver too fast and you could end up with a clear piece of plastic or what would print as a black print.

The next chemical was called a stop bath. This wasn’t in the tank too long; it was poured in just to stop the developer from working. Kind of like how you might put your hard boiled eggs into ice water to stop the cooking process.

Lastly was a chemical called fixer. This would solidify the image on the plastic film base, so it would be more durable. Finally, there was a rinse to get rid of all the chemicals. The film, or strip of negatives were then hung to dry.

This was by far the most boring part to an 8-year-old. Just measured chemistry in and out of the tank.

Once the negatives were dry that’s when the fun part started.

The print making process could be done in “some” light. Usually an amber light, not very bright but bright enough to see what you were doing.

My dad would hold the negatives up to the light and squint to see which image he wanted to make an enlargement of. Once determined, he would put that negative in a small tray that held it in place and he would put into the enlarger and project that image down on the tabletop.

It was here that he focused the negative image to be sharp from the enlarger onto a tray that would hold light sensitive paper. Once everything was focused, the enlarger light would be turned off and a piece of light sensitive paper was taken out of the yellow box and slipped into the tray that was the perfect size for it.

I remember I had to stay back so as not to jiggle the tabletop while the paper was being exposed.

The enlarger was turned on and timed, so it wouldn’t be on too long.

This next part was the fun part, he’d slip that paper into the first of four trays and move it around with a pair of rubber tipped tongs.

Magically, we’d watch the white piece of paper become a black and white image before our eyes. Most of the time it was a picture of me or my brothers goofing off in the yard. A moment captured in time that we weren’t even aware of.

Like processing film, the next tray where the photograph would go into was the Stop bath, to stop the development, the next one was the fixer and finally the last tray was the wash, where the print would spin around slowly from the gentle flow of water. Once it was washed properly, the print was clipped to a wire my dad had strung over the sink, using a clothespin clip it and let it dry.

Once it was dry, you could handle the print, share it with other people or hang it on the wall.

At eight years old, that really stuck with me. It was magical. That pretty much started me on my way loving photography.

At some point, I ultimately got my own camera and started shooting myself. Because of the simple economics of being a teenager, I shot black and white film because it was much less expensive to do than color images. Also, since I always had access to a darkroom, I could process my own film and prints.

Shooting all that film over the years in black and white, taught me to “See” in black and white. And that’s what I encourage you to try to learn.

Today, everything that we shoot, whether it's a digital camera or iPhone, it's always coming out in color. So you're going to get distracted by the color, you may not be looking at the form, you're not always looking for composition, you're looking more at the color.

Most everyone likes a good sunset photograph; they can make our landscape images really stand out. However, a good exercise is to try to shoot a good sunset in black and white.

In order to pull that off, you would have to consider the clouds in the sky, the subject in the foreground, generally, how its composed.

We will talk more after the break about “seeing” in black and white.

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If you start shooting in black and white, and learn to see in black and white, you will become a better photographer because you now have to consider all the aspects of a photograph and not just the color.

So today out in the park, I’m was looking for forms.

There are large bay and oak trees sprouting out of the ground and twisting their way up to the sky. These are interesting forms to compose with.

They each have a strong texture to their bark, and the lichens that are on the side of the bark, as well as moss, those are all giving me all kinds of different tones.

Again, I'm not looking at the color, I'm looking at the tones.

I've got some white in the in the lichens from a close-up view. And then it grades off and then I get some blacks that are in the shadows of the of the bases of the trees. I’m looking for sections that will render as whites and blacks.

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Today gave me an opportunity to shoot some nature photographs in black and white. It presses me into finding details and things that will make the photograph, without relying on color to do the heavy lifting.

I’m trying to SEE in black and white. After a while, you will get this feeling. You’ll look more for textures and the balance of gray tones. Even if you decide you don’t like black and white photography as much, seeing things this way will make you a better photographer.

One of the tools that can help with seeing in black and white is changing your camera’s picture mode to monochrome. In the Sony cameras it’s under the “creative style” menu in the Nikon it’s in “Picture Control” in the Canon it’s called “picture style”.

While the viewfinder will obviously show you what you're looking at through the lens on a DSLR, when you shoot the picture and then look to see the image come up on the back of screen, that’s where it will be rendered in black and white.

If you are using a mirrorless camera that shows the screen in the viewfinder, that image will be in black and white as well as through the viewfinder.

This is a big advantage for shooting with a mirrorless camera as it will really make you aware that you are shooting in black and white. Seeing your composition right there on the screen in black and white.

It is pretty cool to be able to see what you've just shot or about to shoot in black and white.

Assuming that everybody is shooting RAW by now, you are going to have complete control over your image when you get to processing.

You can set your camera on RAW plus Jpeg and get the RAW un-processed version to work with and the monochrome Jpeg image to look at, if that helps.

If you are not shooting RAW, get with it. The RAW file has so much more information in it than Jpegs do. RAW also gives you a wide amount of latitude in the processing of your images.

If you are not sure you want to shoot RAW – do this simple test: Use an empty formatted memory card, Go into your menu and go to “Image quality” section and set your camera on Jpeg normal mode and then look to see how many photographs your card will allow you to store on it. Right that number down. In my camera’s case with the card I’m using, I can get 1400 images when shooting in Jpeg.

There is a possibility that your camera’s tally number will only show 9,999 – that’s because it can only show up to four digits. You likely can shoot much more than 10,000 images depending on size of the card that you have installed. Right the number down anyway. Or use a smaller card if you have one, for this demonstration.

Next, move your camera settings to shoot in RAW mode and then look at your number of how many images you can shoot. That number will be quite a few less. My camera says I can only get 310 images. That means that the RAW files on my camera are more than FOUR TIMES larger than my Jpeg files.

Instead of looking at it, that you don’t get as many shots, I look at it as these RAW files carry more than four times the information! More detail, more latitude more everything!

There are two downsides to shooting in RAW mode. The obvious, that you will need more cards to shoot on, or larger cards. And you will need to have something like Lightroom or Photoshop to even look at your images.

While jpegs are essentially universal digital photographs, a RAW file is just numbers. You will need a program for processing your RAW files that can decipher what those numbers mean and produce a photograph for you. My choice for RAW processing is Adobe Lightroom, but there are many out there to choose from.

Now, back to the topic at hand. If you shoot RAW, that file will NOT be converted into black and white but it will be full color when you open it in Lightroom. You will convert it there.

Think about it like this: If you just let the camera make the conversion to black and white in the Jpeg mode, you are going to be stuck with whatever the camera can process in a second or two.

If you shoot RAW, YOU will have the control to convert it properly into black and white using all the parameters that you want to use.

You don't want to be just using a JPEG that's generated from the camera, because all that camera is doing in the camera is just taking out the color.

And that's not a black and white, I see this all the time on social media, people are posting images that are not black and white, they are essentially pictures without color.

And if you had to really label them, I would say they'd be gray and gray images, not black and white.

A true black and white image will always have a true Black and a true white.

What we used to do in the darkroom to assure we were getting a true white and a true black is we would process an unexposed sheet of paper. That would be our white baseline. This would be “paper” white. On that particular brand of paper, it could get no whiter.

Next, we would take a piece of the same printing paper and bring it outside in the light to be exposed in sunlight for a while. Then we would process that sheet of paper normally. That would come out pure black. That was our black baseline.

Then, on the prints we would produce, we would lay those two test prints over a print and move them around to see if the whitest white would find a match and if the blackest black would find a match. That way we knew we had the full range of black and white.

Today in digital photography it’s much easier, because we have tools built right into Photoshop and Lightroom to check if we have a true black and a true white on our images.

Using the eye dropper tool and the info pallet in photoshop to find that zero rating for an absolute black and looking in the whites for a 255 to get that absolute white. In lightroom, we can use the histograms and clipping warnings to let us know when we have achieved total black and total white in our images.

As we process our images, we can make sure we are attaining the goal of making a true black and white image. It really makes a difference because you'll see that the deeper contrast in your images that covers all the tonal variations.

I suggest you think in terms of black and white, think of the tones that you're working in when you are out shooting.

When I was outside at the park, there was kind of a thin overcast so I wasn’t really getting strong directional light.

If I were shooting a portrait or something, overcast and soft light would be great because it would be a smoother transition from dark to light, making less shadows under the eyes and the wrinkles or lines in the faces would be less apparent.

When you are out shooting in nature and focusing on just shooting black and white your shooting light options may be expanded quite a bit.

As in color photography, shooting early morning and late afternoon is almost always the best. And that also applies for black and white photography. Not only is wildlife more active, but the lower light angle is better for showing off details that are visible but not as harsh.

With wildlife, the lower angle of light will potentially light up the eyes of a critter where light from mid-day might just shadow the eyes from the animal’s brow.

Landscapes are always better at sunrise and sunset as well, both in color and in black and white.

However, when you are shooting and seeing in black and white, you can take advantage of the direct overhead lighting in the middle of the day. Where color images can come off as too harsh, the contrast provided from the light of the middle of the day might be exactly what you are looking for in your black and white images.

Many times, you're looking for contrast, some sort of contrast. So don't let the time of day stop you from going out, just about any time is good for shooting black and white.

And in fact, you can even shoot at night in black and white. The advantage of shooting black and white at night is that with the higher ISOs needed, you won’t have to deal with color noise that can build up in the shadows.

This noise and any other noise will be looked as grain. That granular texture over the entire image and it’s even more apparent in the shadows.

Grain was something that I always tried to try to avoid, when shooting in the black and white film days. At the time, the best we had for speedy film was only 400 speed film or using today’s vernacular – 400 ISO.

If we wanted the ability to shoot in lower light, we would use a technique called “Pushing” the film.

Even though the film was rated at 400 we would shoot it at double or triple that speed say 800 or even 1600 and then compensate for the change by altering the development times or the chemistry itself.

This gave us the ability to shoot in lower light. We could then capture action shots at night, like a football game or such without using a flash.

The lenses back then were not nearly as fast as that can be purchased today and with digital photography we have all those high ISO’s we can input whenever we need to shoot in lower light.

While film didn’t give us much flexibility, nothing like we have today, it did teach us how to see in black and white. Once you got used to planning your images knowing you only had black and white as an option, it forces you to compose better and plan for tones and shadows to tell the story.

Once you learn how to process your images from the color digital file to good black and white files, dig into your archives and see if you have some images that might look good in black and white. If you find some files where the color is off or not helping the image, convert it and see what you may have. You might find you can produce some gems that you had previously overlooked.

If you get a chance, head over to my YouTube Channel and check out my tutorial on how to use Lightroom to create Real black and White images. There I will step you through on how to make those conversions in Lightroom.

Next time you are going out shooting, set up your camera and turn on the monochrome setting and that way you can see how you are adapting to black and white imagery.

In fact, if you set your camera up to shoot both raw and Jpeg, when you load them into Lightroom, you will get the color RAW file that you can convert and you will be able to compare it to the jpeg that the camera made the conversion and you will no doubt see the big difference when you make the conversions yourself.

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In the next episode of the Nature Photography Podcast, I’m going to be heading to a place where black and white photography is king. I love it there and we will talk more about black and white photography.

Until then, this is Terry VanderHeiden your host of