There are many reasons why photographers choose black and white rather than colour, from personal preference to technical reasons.

As a professional photographer, I’m used to doing everything in colour, as it’s always the client’s requirement becasue they want to show off the product’s colours, etc. Hence, their customers know exactly what they are purchasing, and I would never suggest otherwise.

But when it comes to artisticness (the hobby side of my photography), I love black and white but quite often find it difficult becasue I’m trained to look at the colour of a product I’m photographing and make it stand out. And when I see it in colour and B&W, I find it hard to choose, and I often go with the colour version.

Well, I’ve started setting myself the goal of going out and only taking black-and-white photos, shooting them in JPG format, which means no colour information is available to me; what I see is what I get.

The beauty of doing this is that I don’t get distracted by colour in my image, and I’m purely looking at how the light is interacting with the scene for contrast and also composition. So effectively, it’s a more basic way of working. Still, it’s also one less thing for the viewer to take in, which allows them to focus on the content of the image, and this (in my view) is what makes Black and White photography more powerful from an artistic point of view; certainly not something I would recommend for your next marketing campaign when you enagge me as your professional photographer.

These are from a little outing to Coomer Woods in Dudmaston, nr Kidderminster, where I went yesterday for a morning stroll and to practice my discipline of black-and-white only.