Don't forget the black and white

Busy colours in black and white

Capturing image in black and white is much more challenging than in full colour as the variation in colours will only be captured with different levels of grayscale. The following colour combinations will be difficult to differentiate: white and yellow, white and light blue, green and red. As such, textures of the cloud and sky, flower and foliage, sun, sky and cloud at sunset, lips and skin tones will not show any distinct contrast in a black and white format.

Yellow filter to enhance different tones of white

To further highlight these contrasts, filters are available for this purpose. For the old SLR cameras which using 35 mm film, filter can be screwed in-front of the lens to achieve this. For current DSLR cameras, these filters are available in the monochrome adjustment. The filters pre-set are available in yellow, orange, red and green. Yellow filter is used to make the blue sky looks more natural and the white cloud looks crisper. Orange filter will make the blue sky looks slightly darker and sunset looks more brilliant. Red filter will make the blue sky looks quite dark and brown/yellow objects look crisper and brighter. Green filter makes skin tones and lips look fine and tree leaves look crisper and brighter. If your DSLR did not have these pre-set filters, you can get the screwed on filters and used them just like using the UV or polarised filters.

Detail of image (originally rich with different tones of brown) showed with green filter

Other than the filter effects, black and white photography will require optimal light metering. Play with different sets of metering mode and look at the detail of your image captured. Evaluate closely the bright and dark areas. Good metering and the use of filter will produce an image with high contrast, thus, each detail in the image can be clearly seen.