Mobile Photography Weekly

- Hey everybody, Sean here. And in this episode I wanna talk about black and white photography, and specifically shooting in black and white so that that the image that you see on your phone screen appears in black and white as you're composing your pictures. And the reason for this is that when I'm teaching workshops and classes, a lot of people who are new to photography and don't have a lot of experience shooting black and white, often tell me they find it challenging to see photographs in black and white. To actually find compositions that will work good in black and white. Well fortunately, there's of couple of really easy ways around that.

We're gonna be taking a look at this both on the iPhone, and on an Android phone. We'll start off with the iPhone. The simplest way on the iPhone if you're using the built-in iOS camera app is to turn on the live filters. So to turn on the live filters, I'll just come up here to the upper-right, and tap that. Then I've got my filters down here at the bottom. Just gonna choose the basic mono filter. So just a quick tip when you're shooting with the filters. I'm gonna tap on that to close the filter choice. But when a filter is turned on, the icon for the live filters is in color, in red, green and blue.

And when filters are turned off, it is in grayscale. So the nice thing about having a live view of a black and white scene is that if you are new to black and white photography, it will really help you find shots that work well in black and white. And the cool thing about the iPhone is that you can always revert the shot and turn it off if you want to, or edit the black and white qualities after you've taken it. So let's take a picture here. And we'll come into the editing suite of the photos app.

And if I just tap on the editing dial here, I can come in and modify the qualities of the black and white by going down to black and white. And by changing the slider here you can see how the brightness values of different elements in the scene are changing, particularly those flowers there. And if I wanna revert back to the color version, let's say I don't want it to be black and white, I can tap on the filters, and then just come back and set that into color. And let's come back here and turn black and white off by tapping on that little button there.

So really useful functionality for not only capturing the scene in black and white, but also modifying the black and white qualities. There are other apps like Snapseed, Lightroom CC for mobile that allow you to do the same things on the editing end. Let's jump over to the Android phone and take a look at an app called Hypno Cam for black and white photography. So this is the capture part of the Hypno Cam app. And it's showing us the scene in black and white, I can of course take a picture. Or a really cool feature that I appreciate is I can come up to the filter button up in the upper-right, and that's the same kind of button that you see in iOS.

And I can filter the scene as I am setting it up and photographing it. So for instance, if I tap on red, pay attention to what happens to the red flowers. They're gonna get a lot brighter. Let's go ahead and take that shot there. And then if I wanna edit this, let's go into my little gallery view, and open one up to edit. I can make those same changes after the fact. I can come in and apply a range of different black and white filter presets that come with Hypno Cam.

There's also other ones that you can purchase through an in-app purchase. Or you can also come in and edit those black and white colors after the fact by tapping on that same filter button. And you can get that same functionality of modifying the tonal values by choosing different color filters. So if you're new to photographing in black and white, and you find that it is easier to help you find your shots to see the scene in black and white on your phone, try out some of these methods, or look for other apps that offer that same functionality.