Whats the best advice you were given starting out in black and white photography?

[Jennifer Johnson]

How do you decide which shutter speed or F Stop is best for picture taking?

[John Farrell]

It depends on the circumstances - for stopping action, you need a fast shutter speed, which usually needs a wider aperture. Modern cameras have selectable modes, suited to different circumstances, which your manual will explain. Only if you use a manual setting, or a basic film camera, will you have to set shutter speeds and apertures yourself.

[Niels - NHSN]

@Jennifer Johnson The question in your thread title: Are you thinking about film or digital photography?

[Niels - NHSN]

OK, noticed your other thread, so assume you mean film.

 

[Niels - NHSN]

Advice I should have listened to: Stick to one film and one process until you know it intimately - before you start experimenting.  

Another: When trying to improve your process, change only one paramenter at a time.

 

[rodeo_joe1]

7 hours ago, Jennifer Johnson said:

How do you decide which shutter speed or F Stop is best for picture taking?

Sorry, but if you don't already know those basics, using film will just prevent you from learning them. Or at least slow your learning to a crawl. 

Get a digital camera that allows full manual control and you'll be able to just see what effect the shutter and aperture have. Because even an SLR camera won't properly preview the effect of aperture.

With a digital camera; in about 10 minutes you can run through a range of exposures at different apertures, shutter speeds, and even vary the effective ISO. Whereas film's processing time delays visual feedback by hours or days, such that there's no mental connect between what you did to the camera and the final image.

The current cost of film also puts a mental block on freely experimenting with camera settings. "Oooh, $10 to find out what every stop on my lens looks like? No way, I'll just skip that step of learning and snap random pictures with the hope that they'll 'come out' alright." 

Edited October 27, 2022 by rodeo_joe1

[Niels - NHSN]

Yeah, it is certainly easier, faster and cheaper to learn the basic concepts of photography with a digital camera. But you will need to dumb the digital camera down if you want to replicate how things would work with film.

No auto ISO, no auto white balance, if the camera has some sort of auto high dynamic range, you'd have to disable that - disable image stabilisation as well (all the nice inventions that makes digital photography so easy)

Questions related to aperture and shutter speed is on page 1 and 2 of any old photo instruction book published prior to 2000 and you are probably better off finding such a coherent introduction to the subject so you can learn it in the right context and logical order.

Edited October 27, 2022 by NHSN

[Jennifer Johnson]

Thank you all for your advice so far! I am in an Introduction to Photographic Media course where she assigns projects that we need to capture using black and white film on a 50mm manual camera. Then we develop and process it in the darkroom. I've learned dodging and burning and mastered that. It's just sometimes I will have darker faces in a picture that my light meter tells me the correct setting.  I understand how to show movement and freeze movement in my shutter speed but question my aperature, Thanks in advance!

I look forward to just being digital after this, as its very expensive class to get the right shot! This is what I captured on my phone and I hope it comes out on film..

[Tony Parsons]

Started in the late Sixties, very basic camera (hand-held light meter !) - read many photographic magazines and books from local library, slowly (and that is the appropriate term) improving from maybe one good shot per roll (commercially processed) to (eventually) double figures. Then got married, so I could black out the kitchen for a darkroom (that wasn't the only reason, of course), and I felt my photography was slowly improving. Joined local camera club, entered a few competitions, sold a few prints. Don't recall asking for or receiving any advice - got all the info I found helpful from the printed word (and pictures, of course). 

[SCL]

Jennifer - Your comment on darkened faces made me think back to my learning the basics of exposure back over 60 years ago. And what we learned holds today too. Meters will expose toward an 18% gray....so if you measure an egg and a piece of black fabric in the same light, and use the unadjusted exposure your meter recommends both will turn out gray instead of white and black. This is where the organ between your ears (the brain) comes into play. To achieve the whiteness you need to increase the exposure, and to achieve the blackness you need to reduce the exposure. Which brings us to your comment on faces. Caucasian faces need an increase in measured exposure (often written as you measure the light on your hand and increase exposure 1/3-1 1/2 stops). And for people with dark skin the process is the reverse. Which is why I much prefer incident light exposure meters, which measure the light falling on the subject rather than the light being reflected by the subject. I hope these comments help you achieve your desired results or give you insight into an area for further exploration. I strongly agree with the comments on reducing the learning curve and expense, by experimenting with a digital camera in the manual mode - and then if you lifilm, you can transfer what you learned at a much lower cost.

[James G. Dainis]

Here is a photo of me on my front porch:

The camera meter exposed well for the background. In real life you would recognize my facial features easily enough but the camera just does not have more than 10 stops of latitude compared to the human eye/brain range. You would have to take a meter reading of my face and then open up one stop to get a good exposure of my face, but then the background would be greatly overexposed appearing almost white. You would have to learn how to use fill flash in a situation like this or else delve into The Zone system of development i.e.  expose for the shadows, develop for the highlights. Ask you instructor about that.

 

 

[rodeo_joe1]

On 10/27/2022 at 7:10 PM, Jennifer Johnson said:

I am in an Introduction to Photographic Media course where she assigns projects that we need to capture using black and white film on a 50mm manual camera.

Sounds like that course should be fully titled "Introduction to Historical Photographic Media With No Relevence To Modern Practices."

And maybe your tutor should teach you the technical basics of exposure before chucking you in at the deep end. 

The advice to get an old-school paper book on the subject is good.

There are quite a few in PDF form online for free, but there's still nothing like being able to flick pages back-and-forth to re-read anything that didn't sink in on first reading. 

BTW, your elephant shot has a lot of tones that are going to look a similar shade of grey in B&W. You might have trouble with printing it unless you throw a bit more frontal light on it. 

I just did a digital emulation that shows a red filter will improve it quite a lot. 

Edited October 29, 2022 by rodeo_joe1

[q.g._de_bakker]

1 minute ago, rodeo_joe1 said:

[...]

The advice to get an old-school paper book on the subject is good.

There are quite a few in PDF form online for free, but there's still nothing like being able to flick pages back-and-forth to re-read anything that didn't sink in on first reading. 

"Introduction to Historical Lexicographic Media with no Relevance to Modern Reading Practices."

You can "flick pages back-and-forth to [etc.]" in PDF and other format ebooks.

[rodeo_joe1]

3 minutes ago, q.g._de_bakker said:

"Introduction to Historical Lexicographic Media with no Relevance to Modern Reading Practices."

You can "flick pages back-and-forth to [etc.]" in PDF and other format ebooks.

Have you never heard of learning styles? Some people are kinaesthetic learners who benefit from linking a physical action to the knowledge they're trying to assimilate. 

So the handling (and smelling) of a physical book certainly still has relevance. 

[q.g._de_bakker]

And so has handling and smelling film.

[JDMvW]

'f/8 and 'be there'

In a PBS documentary on the Roosevelt-era FSA and Stryker and the photographers working for him,

"f/11 and hold it steady"

was the advice that Walker Evans finally gave --when pressed
for advice on how to shoot-- to the painter Ben Shahn (also employed by the FSA).

There have been a few discussions here on Photo.net about the phrase "f8 and be there." It's been attributed to Weegee
(Arthur Fellig) in the late 40's. Others have said Robert Capa, and other more recent editors and photographers have been
suggested. Most of these are probably later than the Evans statement.
I've tried to Google™ the quotation, but it's mostly unattributed or simply presented as "an old saying"

Back when I was shooting Plus-X, Kodachrome 25 and II,  it was "between f/8 and f/11 at 125th of a second".

Edited November 2, 2022 by JDMvW

[Ricochetrider]

Well, it sounds to me as if your photographic jounrey is just beginning, BUT to answer your thread title question, "what's the best advice you were given starting out in B&W photography?", a photographer friend once told me the following:

"color is for color, & black and white is for everything else". 

I believe it's good advice no matter what you're shooting. 

That said, your opening post, and the content  of this thread suggest a lot more going on than simply this. BUT, relative to B&W photography, there was at one time a school of thought surrounding the concept of "seeing" in black and white- I suppose that meant imagining how things would look in a B&W photo as opposed to real world, full color? Now of course one may easily switch any photo from color to monochrome to check out how it may appear. 

Don't discount the validity of learning on older and much more simple cameras (and lenses). As you'll soon find out, modern cameras have thousands of functions, and far too many switches, buttons, levers, & dials. WAY more than anyone really needs, at least in my own opinion. All one really needs at first (and I'm sure there'll be arguments to the contrary) is to understand aperture functions, shutter speeds, and ISO settings, all relative to one another. Oh and some basic compositional rules of course. 

Wishing you the very best tho, in learning and mastering photography! 

[za33photo]

Take LOTS of pictures , (digital is good for this).

Read up on photography , (the old paper books are still good).

It depends on what you want from photography , if you want to make money from photography , you will have to take classes and studiously follow the herd.

Photography is one of my hobbies done purely for self-satisfaction , and not for money , so  take these suggestions from where they come , I am not a good photographer , but do "my own thing".

But always have fun.

Edited November 6, 2022 by za33photo
Poor sentence construction LOL.

[kmac]

For this in B&W an educated guess would be 1/60sec, f2.8 at 125ASA .... f2.8 because the elephant is in shade. In brighter light, then f5.6.

But then there's depth-of-field to think about, so if the artwork is not to be blurred anywhere, as it is at the bottom in this pic, the aperture needs to be closed down, the f2.8 would be changed to f4 and a shutter speed of a 1/30sec ... hold the camera still.

[kmac]

On 10/27/2022 at 1:29 PM, Jennifer Johnson said:

How do you decide which shutter speed or F Stop is best for picture taking?

The easiest way is by using a light meter. Failing that, it's fairly easy to remember that in bright sunlight, the settings are usually 1/100sec, f16 at 100ASA

It's called the "Sunny 16 Rule" ... https://photographylife.com/what-is-the-sunny-16-rule

From that point, the aperture is opened up to different settings for different shades of shadow light. Light shadow f8. Darker shadow, f5.6 and so on. These shadows are from overcast clouds, shade from trees, or under verandas etc. Indoors really requires flash unless there is ample light for handheld shots at say 1/60sec or 1/30sec, any slower will probably result in camera shake and blurred images.

Edited November 6, 2022 by kmac

[Jennifer Johnson]

10 hours ago, kmac said:

For this in B&W an educated guess would be 1/60sec, f2.8 at 125ASA .... f2.8 because the elephant is in shade. In brighter light, then f5.6.

But then there's depth-of-field to think about, so if the artwork is not to be blurred anywhere, as it is at the bottom in this pic, the aperture needs to be closed down, the f2.8 would be changed to f4 and a shutter speed of a 1/30sec ... hold the camera still.

Great answers!! This is how an image like it turned out in the lab

[Jennifer Johnson]

10 hours ago, kmac said:

The easiest way is by using a light meter. Failing that, it's fairly easy to remember that in bright sunlight, the settings are usually 1/100sec, f16 at 100ASA

It's called the "Sunny 16 Rule" ... https://photographylife.com/what-is-the-sunny-16-rule

From that point, the aperture is opened up to different settings for different shades of shadow light. Light shadow f8. Darker shadow, f5.6 and so on. These shadows are from overcast clouds, shade from trees, or under verandas etc. Indoors really requires flash unless there is ample light for handheld shots at say 1/60sec or 1/30sec, any slower will probably result in camera shake and blurred images.

Thanks for your input! I will share this information with my class in a presentation. It was very helpful. Thanks!

[Jennifer Johnson]

On 11/2/2022 at 4:58 PM, Ricochetrider said:

Well, it sounds to me as if your photographic jounrey is just beginning, BUT to answer your thread title question, "what's the best advice you were given starting out in B&W photography?", a photographer friend once told me the following:

"color is for color, & black and white is for everything else". 

I believe it's good advice no matter what you're shooting. 

That said, your opening post, and the content  of this thread suggest a lot more going on than simply this. BUT, relative to B&W photography, there was at one time a school of thought surrounding the concept of "seeing" in black and white- I suppose that meant imagining how things would look in a B&W photo as opposed to real world, full color? Now of course one may easily switch any photo from color to monochrome to check out how it may appear. 

Don't discount the validity of learning on older and much more simple cameras (and lenses). As you'll soon find out, modern cameras have thousands of functions, and far too many switches, buttons, levers, & dials. WAY more than anyone really needs, at least in my own opinion. All one really needs at first (and I'm sure there'll be arguments to the contrary) is to understand aperture functions, shutter speeds, and ISO settings, all relative to one another. Oh and some basic compositional rules of course. 

Wishing you the very best tho, in learning and mastering photography! 

Thank you for your input! I love what you said and will mesh it into my presentation to my class. I purchased an older camera, and we need to get down to basics in this class with knowing aperature, shutter speeds, bracketing, etc.. along with darkroom techniques. It's been fun so far!

[Jennifer Johnson]

On 10/29/2022 at 8:33 AM, q.g._de_bakker said:

"Introduction to Historical Lexicographic Media with no Relevance to Modern Reading Practices."

You can "flick pages back-and-forth to [etc.]" in PDF and other format ebooks.

I thank you for your input, I do have a book that was required for class but also a presentation I need to make allotting the comments of this particular thread. I do like to go back and and reread certain parts and reference back when I need it though:-)

[Jennifer Johnson]

On 11/2/2022 at 12:21 PM, JDMvW said:

'f/8 and 'be there'

In a PBS documentary on the Roosevelt-era FSA and Stryker and the photographers working for him,

"f/11 and hold it steady"

was the advice that Walker Evans finally gave --when pressed
for advice on how to shoot-- to the painter Ben Shahn (also employed by the FSA).

There have been a few discussions here on Photo.net about the phrase "f8 and be there." It's been attributed to Weegee
(Arthur Fellig) in the late 40's. Others have said Robert Capa, and other more recent editors and photographers have been
suggested. Most of these are probably later than the Evans statement.
I've tried to Google™ the quotation, but it's mostly unattributed or simply presented as "an old saying"

Back when I was shooting Plus-X, Kodachrome 25 and II,  it was "between f/8 and f/11 at 125th of a second".

I will definetly ask my professor about this, and to elaborate. I will look into this as well!!:-)