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For years, I assumed discovering your photographic type was one thing that occurred naturally. You shot sufficient footage, used sufficient cameras, tried sufficient lenses and, finally, there it was. Your look. Your voice. Something that made a picture unmistakably yours. But for me, that second solely actually arrived after I stopped taking pictures in coloration.
That choice was not some short-lived experiment both. I’ve now been taking pictures predominantly in monochrome for greater than 4 years, and I genuinely haven’t regarded again. What began as a inventive change shortly grew to become the way in which I needed to see the world via a digital camera. The longer I’ve caught with it, the extra pure it has turn into, to the purpose the place I typically discover myself seeing scenes in black and white earlier than I even increase the digital camera to my eye.
That would possibly sound unusual coming from somebody who spent years working as an expert sports activities photographer. Back then, coloration was elementary to what I did. The colours of the shirts, the promoting boards, the floodlights, the gang, and the ambiance had been all a part of telling the story. Sports pictures is about immediacy, and coloration helps place you proper there within the second. I by no means actually questioned it as a result of it was merely a part of the job.
But my pictures has modified significantly since then. These days, I’m much more concerned about documenting the world round me. I need to {photograph} odd locations, folks, buildings, landscapes and little fragments of on a regular basis life which may not seem notably necessary right this moment, however may turn into extremely necessary in 20, 30 or 50 years. And unusually, eradicating coloration from these images has made me see these topics extra clearly than ever earlier than.
Once I dedicated myself to monochrome, I began mild in another way. I started noticing shadows, textures, shapes, and distinction relatively than whether or not the colours inside a scene labored collectively. I’ve intentionally pushed in the direction of a heavier, higher-contrast black-and-white type, with deep blacks and powerful highlights, and it has fully modified the way in which I strategy {a photograph}. Instead of merely recording what’s in entrance of me, I discover myself pondering far more about how the scene will translate into tones.
That change did not happen overnight. Over the past four years, my eye has gradually adapted to the way I now want my photographs to look. I notice strong shafts of light falling across a pavement, the separation between a dark coat and a pale wall, the texture of an old stone building or the way mist flattens a distant landscape. These are the things that now catch my attention, and in many ways I think monochrome has trained me to be more selective and more deliberate.
There is also something wonderfully timeless about monochrome photography. I can photograph something this morning and, under the right conditions, the resulting image could almost have been made 40 or 50 years ago. Obviously, the world leaves clues about when a photograph was taken – cars, clothes, road signs and architecture all give the game away eventually – but black and white somehow removes that immediate timestamp that color can bring. It turns a contemporary photograph into something that already feels slightly archival.
That timeless quality has become increasingly important to me because I no longer want my photographs simply to say, “this is what this place looked like today.” I want them to feel like records. I want someone to be able to look at them decades from now and see not just a location, but a way of life, a mood and a moment that no longer exists in quite the same way.
That is probably why monochrome increasingly feels more documentary to me. I know that is entirely subjective, and documentary photography certainly does not need to be black and white, but when I look at the photographers whose work I find myself returning to, there is often a simplicity and permanence that comes from stripping away color. James Ravilious is a particularly good example. His photographs of rural England were not simply beautiful images of the countryside; they became records of communities, working lives, and ways of living that were gradually changing around him.
That idea resonates enormously with how I want to photograph now. I live in a part of England where so much still feels connected to an older way of life, but I am also very aware that it will not remain that way forever. Old buildings disappear. Independent shops close. Farms change. Villages expand. Traditional pubs are refurbished beyond recognition or vanish altogether. The things we walk past every day without thinking can suddenly become historically significant the moment they are gone.
The modern world moves incredibly quickly, and that makes me want to photograph these things while they are still here. It might be an old sign painted onto the side of a building, a farmer working in a field, a village shop that has barely changed in decades, or simply the way people gather in a particular place. None of these things necessarily feel important when you are standing in front of them, but photography has a wonderful habit of making the ordinary valuable with the passing of time.
And that is where I think monochrome has given my photography a greater sense of purpose. I am no longer simply waiting for beautiful light and making a nice photograph of something because it looks attractive. I am trying to make a record of it. Shooting in black and white somehow encourages me to treat even the most ordinary subjects with a little more seriousness, as though I am creating an archive rather than simply filling a memory card.
There is another benefit too. Removing color removes a distraction. A bright red car, a fluorescent shop sign, or someone wearing an especially vivid jacket can completely dominate a color photograph, even when that was never what initially interested me about the scene. In monochrome, those elements become shapes and tones instead, allowing me to decide what really matters within the frame.
That simplicity has also made me much more confident in my editing. I am no longer endlessly tweaking color temperature, saturation, or individual hues, trying to make an image feel right. My decisions are now much more focused around contrast, exposure, and tonality. Do I want the shadows to fall into darkness? Should that highlight remain bright? Does the image need more separation between the subject and the background? Those choices feel far more connected to the photograph itself rather than simply its color palette.
Perhaps most importantly, monochrome has finally given me the photographic eye I have been searching for. I now recognize the scenes I want before I even lift the camera. Harsh afternoon shadows, mist hanging over a field, weathered stone, an old shopfront, someone standing in a doorway – I can almost see the finished black-and-white photograph before I press the shutter. That certainty was something I never really had when I was constantly thinking about color.
Four years of shooting this way have made that instinct stronger. There is a consistency to my work now that I had struggled to find before, and that consistency is probably the closest thing I have ever had to what people call a photographic style. It is not about applying the same preset to every image or making everything look identical. It is about consistently being drawn towards the same kind of light, the same textures, the same subjects, and the same atmosphere.
And perhaps that is the biggest lesson monochrome has taught me. Style is not something you necessarily manufacture. Sometimes it appears when you remove the things that are getting in the way.
I spent a long time believing that developing a style meant finding a particular camera, lens, focal length, or editing preset. For me, it turned out to be much simpler. I just had to remove something. I stopped shooting in color more than four years ago, and I have not looked back. In doing so, I finally started seeing the photographs I had wanted to make all along.
See our guide to the best cameras for black-and-white photography
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