Black and White Wedding Photographers in the South West

Being based in Cornwall and covering the South West, as well as the rest of the UK and Europe by agreement, we have become skilled in providing contemporary, black and white reportage wedding photography.

Black and White photography as prints has been around since around 1839, and stayed as a similar process of a negative transferred to a positive (a print) up until the advent of professional digital photography in 1990’s with the introduction of the Nikon D1 with a now embarrassing 2 mega pixels, the same or less than most mobile phone cameras now!

Since then digital cameras have increased in quality and mega pixels, but we are now left with the problem of how to create black and white images. Photoshop, the universal standard in professional digital photo manipulation has at least 6 ways to create a black and white image that we know about, there may be more!

 

We capture all of our images digitally in colour, as we have since around 2005, and use different techniques, depending on the original image to create the stunning black and white images that you see on our website.

Before we get technical and explain our techniques, and why we use them, lets first look at why we choose to create Black and White Wedding Photography.

Black and White images always have a timeless feel to them, and are a wonderful way to focus the viewer’s attention on the subject without the distraction of colour. For example when you view a photo of a Bride stood near a bright red wedding car, your eye would first focus on the Bride as you know that is the element you should be looking at, but the colour red would draw your eye away from the subject to the car. Maybe this was intended, but I doubt it! Simply converting this image to Black and White would make the viewer focus on the Bride for longer. This is just one reason why we use Black and White images in our Wedding Photography. Another is often in churches the vicar requests that we don’t use flash, meaning we have to use available light, which is often ‘warm’ a yellow/red colour. Whilst we can do our best to neutralise the colour balance/colour temperature, it is nearly impossible to balance the unnatural light source (bulbs) from the daylight coming through the window, so a colour cast is inevitable. Whilst this can add to the warmth and romance of the image converting to Black and White will not show any colour casts.

We spend a great deal of time converting wedding images we believe would work well in black and white from the original colour photo, giving you a version of both. We are always careful to retain a good tonal range from the deepest blacks to the whitest white, with plenty of contrast to give you strong punchy images. We use a very similar method to that of a traditional darkroom printer. We convert to black and white and adjust the Red, Green and Blue elements in the image, and control the overall contrast of the image. We occasional use a colour cast on some of our wedding images. Occasionally adding a subtle sepia tone to warm up an image looks great whilst adding a slight blue cast to a rainy wedding photo gives a cooler feeling to it to emphasize the coldness of rain.

Batch converting of colour images to Black and White is one thing we dislike about some photographers, as we believe that each image deserves an individual conversion to get the highest possible quality.

We take inspiration from Ansel Adams, an American Photographer best know for his Black and White Photography taken around the National Parks. He developed the Zone System as a way to determine a correct exposure to retain a full tonal range in a black and white print.

Have a look at some of the black and white wedding photography in the South West images we have on this page and on our website galleries for some examples of the contemporary images we produce.