7 tips for black & white street photography with Alan Schaller

[Music] hello there is al inshallah here and in this video I'm going to be talking to you about how to improve your black and white street photography tip number one go out shooting black and white on purpose that may sound obvious but if you go out shooting with color and black and white in mind you may find that you confuse yourself color requires a whole different skill set and if you dedicate yourself for like one month every day of shooting in black and white if you can you'll see some marked improvements for sure tip number

two is to focus on the things that make black and white interesting is again there's another one that sounds really obvious but color doesn't really affect black and white as much as things like texture and tonality and contrast and light those are the things to look out for a lady in a red coat in may look great in color in black and white it's just one shade of gray so it's important to look for that kind of contrast and to light that varies across the frame is possible tip number three is to be realistic with

the light situation that you have with presented in front of you you know everyone wants to be able to shoot high contrast stuff but on a day like today for example you just can't so you have to look for other things to shoot I think it's frustrating for photographers to try and force their will upon the environment rather than letting the environment dictate the look and feel of the photos so on a day when it's rainy there are other things to shoot like reflections and the mood of a city or a countryside in the rain

and you know when the sun's out there are lots of other options like backlighting and shadows and all that kind of thing so it's just about accepting what you have and drawing with it there's no such thing as bad light [Music] tip number four make good use of your environment and by that I mean the geometry there's context the things like reflections and you know getting creative with your environment and bringing that into the frame not just focusing on the human element of the picture if you can get the magic trio of a good subject

good environment and good light all together in one frame you're winning [Music] tip number five is to do with contrast and tonality so Ansel Adams if you haven't heard of him I recommend you go check out his work immediately he came up with this thing called the zone system and he believed that in a black-and-white picture you have to have every tone represented from black to white and all the gray tones in between so making sure that your images have a good range of contrast and tone in them is important you don't have to have

a super negative space super high contrast image but it's nice to have all of those tones represented in an image tip number six is to do with perspective this doesn't strictly refer to black and white photography necessarily but what I mean is shooting from interesting angles if you are always shooting from from head height the whole time you're presenting the world as we see it every day and there's nothing wrong with that necessarily but I like to present the world in ways that are slightly different to how we see it every day and giving the

viewer the opportunity to see things differently so putting the camera a funny angle maybe getting above your subjects and shooting down or shooting below up things like that can add a nice twist to an image tip number seven is to do with editing when you've captured your material you've got to let that define how the Edit looks if you want to kind of push the file like crazy it's possible to do but in 99% of the case if you haven't got it already in the frame you can't force it to happen in the in the

edit so I liken it to the editing is like varnishing a table that's already been well made editing is not the table itself whereas editing shouldn't be the whole process it shouldn't be that table it should just be the varnish that finishes everything off and makes the final products look perfect [Music]