The Experiment
For one month, I shot exclusively in black and white. No exceptions.
It started as a casual challenge — strip color away and see what’s left. What I didn’t expect was how much it would change the way I see the world entirely, even after the month was over.
What Disappears, What Remains
When color is gone, the photograph has to survive on other things: light, shadow, texture, form. The pretty green of a lawn becomes irrelevant. What matters is whether the light is hitting the blades of grass at the right angle to make them sing against the dark soil beneath.
You stop noticing what things are and start noticing how they feel.
A concrete wall becomes a canvas of texture. A person’s face becomes a study in planes and shadows. The world flattens into contrast — and somehow, becomes more dimensional.
The Technical Shift
My process changed completely:
- I started metering for shadows first, letting highlights blow out rather than the other way around.
- I paid more attention to the direction of light before I even raised the camera.
- I started looking for geometric shapes — lines, curves, the edges of things — that I would have previously ignored.
The Canon XT I was using at the time didn’t have a great sensor for low-light work. But shooting monochrome hid a lot of noise and gave those rough edges a kind of gritty beauty they wouldn’t have had in color.
What I Kept After
The month ended. Color came back. But something stayed:
I still look for the light first. I still check whether a scene has structure before I care about its palette. And sometimes, when I look at an image in post, I convert it to black and white just to see if the bones are strong enough — because if it works without color, it almost always works with it too.
Strip everything back, and what’s left will tell you what the photo was really about.