Seeing in Black and White

[Fatih Ayoglu]

I have one as well, the problem is after few seconds, you brain is adjusting the BW image into a color one, you cant trick your brain easily...

Mine is from Heliopan

 

[juan]

I found that a pair of dark yellow glasses sold to target shooters was just about the same as my Zone VI filter. They're certainly easier to wear.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

In the 60 while in college I took a summer workshop with Minor White, we spent a lot of time looking through a wratten. It took some time to "see in black and white, not sure if I really saw in black and white, more like anticipated. I never attended an Ansal Adams workshop, but have been told by those who did that he used the same process. I have set of Zone VI viewing filter, have used them in years.

Here's my Zone VI filter with neck lanyard with the instructions. I still have it but haven't used it in years. If you get one, make sure it's the same format as your camera so you can also use it to help compose the shot and select the lens. It takes a lot of practice to see in BW with it. Today I use my digital camera as a director's viewfinder set to BW. Unfortunately, there's no 4x5 setting so I set it for 4:3 which is very close to the same format. (20:15 rather than 20:16 equivalent)

 

[Ballinderry-Michael]

Not long ago I bought this Ilford pair on eBay. It looks and feels to me like a product of the 1930s. The first photo shows the pair in their "tortoiseshell" handle and their leather case; the second looks through them at a rather boring view from my study window; and the third illustrates what each filter is called. I find them amusing to use but don't depend too much on them.

 

[Daniela]

The FilmLab app lets you look at scene and see it in either color or black and white negative form. It's pretty cool, although I only use it to look at my negative while they're drying.

 

[L Gebhardt]

Smartphone to the rescue.

Mark II Artist’s Viewfinder for the iPhone lets you frame a scene using user-specified focal lengths and film sizes. The app uses the phone’s camera with framing lines for the lens’s focal length to show a preview of the scene. Its best feature, IMO, is its ability to display the scene in black and white. You get a direct view of tonal relationships that’s much better than what you get with a Wratten 90.

I've been using the app Viewfinder Preview which works well, and is also free. It has support for different lenses and formats, and can view with black and white and contrast filters (though those don't seem to work very well in my testing). It's mostly replaced my use of the Linhof view finder.

 

[Pieter12]

I usually keep an orange filter on my camera. It helps render the SLR viewfinder image monotone.

 

[Alex Benjamin]

I have the Tiffen one, and find it extremely practical in certain situations. Most people don't use it correctly. You shouldn't stare into it for a long time, but flick it (of flicker it, never quite understood the difference between the two) in front of your eyes, looking into it for just a couple of seconds. Your eyes' iris is constantly adjusting to the different levels of brightness around you, and to the different levels of luminance in the scene you're looking at, something a black and white film cannot do. If you stare too long into the filter, your eye starts adjusting, which is what you want to avoid. Switching back and forth between eyesight and "filter-sight" avoids this.

It's very helpful to see in advance how much, or how little shadow detail you actually have, as well as figuring out the luminance level of different colors, which might end up being translated into the same level of grey on film — avoiding the "I had this wonderful blue subject in front of a gorgeous red wall with some beautiful green trees next to it and I don't understand why I'm barely seeing anything of it and it's so blah on my film" syndrome .

I think it's a great tool to have. Maybe not essential, but certainly practical.

 

[ic-racer]

I'm not color blind, but I 'see' scenes in B&W or at least I can appreciate just the light and dark in the scene, which is the same think to me. So I have never needed one of those filters.

The corollary is that I have no interest in color photography. No interest in taking color photographs, and no interest in viewing also. If I see a B&W photograph on a distant wall, it catches my interest. When I see color photographs, I pay no attention.

 

[Sirius Glass]

Seeing/imaging in B&W is a bit like seeing the image upside down on the ground glass of a LF camera ore left-right reversed through the chimney viewer of a MF camera. After a while your brain is switching on some kind of auto pilot and you forget about it...
An other way is: reed about "previsualization" in Ansel Adams's books and it might help you a little bit more.

BTW, if you, on any occasion, might be applying the famous 'Zone-System' this helps you see and evaluate in grey tones/zones...

I agree. With experience on learns to "see in black & white".

 

[DREW WILEY]

The old Kodak pocket film guides, often enclosed in leather like a wallet, had a set of viewing gels in them equivalent to all the most common b&w contrast filters. But I never use viewing filters. Once in awhile, I look through at a scene through a contrast filter before screwing it onto the lens, to make certain it's the right choice. Otherwise, I thought the whole point of photography, whether in the field or in the darkroom, was to find some relaxation, and get away from any kind of damn phone.

 

[albada]

I'm not color blind, but I 'see' scenes in B&W or at least I can appreciate just the light and dark in the scene, which is the same think to me. So I have never needed one of those filters.

The corollary is that I have no interest in color photography. No interest in taking color photographs, and no interest in viewing also. If I see a B&W photograph on a distant wall, it catches my interest. When I see color photographs, I pay no attention.

I even dream in B&W. When looking at photos that are a mix of B&W and color, I hardly notice the difference.
I am unable to "match" colors, for example, of clothes. I see the colors fine, but matching them is beyond me.
For me, color is attractive only in an unusually colorful scene; otherwise, I ignore color.

Mark

 

[DREW WILEY]

I'm obsessed with fine nuances of color, even when black and white printing. The toning and final image color has to be very specific to the individual image. But the emphasis on loud overtly-saturated colors among many color practitioners today simply demonstrates how little they actually understand about color. It's like cranking up the boom box as high as you can get, and confusing that with music, or like slathered honey and jam atop sugar cubes and confusing that with taste.

But this thread is really about something else, which involves perceiving how any particular film will itself translate a given scene into a grayscale, and do so in a somewhat different manner than our own eyes see it. I have nothing against viewing filters to assist the learning curve; but at a certain point you just get comfortable doing it intuitively instead.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

Using viewing filters is for amateurs. I just close my eyes and imagine the scene in black and white.

 

[SodaAnt]

Here's the difference between using a smartphone viewfinder app that can display in black and white and using a Wratten 90.

First, the viewfinder app in B&W mode (with frame lines for a 90mm lens on a 6x7 camera):

Now the same view with the Wratten 90 viewing filter:

Which do you prefer? I prefer the first one.

 

[DREW WILEY]

How about seeing red. That's easy to simulate. Just walk out carrying your camera, and wearing a red coat, into a pasture with a angry bull in it.

 

[SodaAnt]

How about seeing red. That's easy to simulate. Just walk out carrying your camera, and wearing a red coat, into a pasture with a angry bull in it.

Bulls are colorblind. Bull fighter's red capes are just for show.

 

[DREW WILEY]

That bulls are colorblind is an urban myth which gets ignorantly repeated over and over again. I knew someone would respond that way. And I emphasize "urban" myth because everyone who has actually grown up around bulls, or raised them, knows the truth. We had a rodeo Hall-of-Famer right down the road who bred Brahma bulls for sake of rodeo meanness. He was a famous rodeo clown whose job was to tempt the bulls away from the thrown riders in the arena, and was himself gored six times in his career. Ask someone like that the implications of red.

There was an old bull which used to get into the family garden, so benign that my mother would hit it with a broom to chase it away. But my new bride was a city gal, and walked up the road into open pasture where that bull was grazing, wearing a bright red new coat. The bull charged (it had never charged anyone before), and she had to dive into a muddy culvert under the road. She showed up back at the house all terrified and covered with mud. It was holiday time with the whole family there, and everyone started howling with laughter, because everyone else had been chased and treed, or forced over a fence, by bulls many times before, including myself. A rite of passage.

Incidentally, I was right there when it happened, and the bull totally ignored me. I wasn't wearing red.

Moral of the story : Don't select a red dark cloth if you like to work with a view camera in open pastures, unless you are indeed capable of handling it with the same level of skill as a real matador.

 

[MattKing]

We had a rodeo Hall-of-Famer right down the road who bred Brahma bulls for sake of rodeo meanness. He was a famous rodeo clown whose job was to temp the bulls away from the thrown riders in the arena, and was himself gored six times in his career.

Are you sure he isn't posting as a current Photrio member?

 

[DREW WILEY]

Well, that would be difficult since he passed away. I grew up with his oldest son and played in the hay fort in his barn. He had begun as an ordinary cowpoke, but soon became so wealthy as a rodeo star that at one time his ranch was half a million acres in size, and he married a Brooklyn model. Fences were up to two miles apart, and once the fog lifted out on one of those fields, and a Brahma bull would start squinting at you trying to figure you out hiking across, you'd start looking for every little ravine and depression around to hide in. The huge ranch itself has been subsequently broken up somewhat due to inheritance issues. One of the other members over on the Large Format Forum also knew him quite well. Just Google Wilbur Plaugher.

He was a big man, and his most famous trick was to pull a live donkey colt out of his huge baggy clown pants in front of the audience. Once one of those colts got too big, it was given to my sister as a pet, and kept in our own pasture.

 

[SodaAnt]

That bulls are colorblind is an urban myth which gets ignorantly repeated over and over again. I knew someone would respond that way. And I emphasize "urban" myth because everyone who has actually grown up around bulls, or raised them, knows the truth. We had a rodeo Hall-of-Famer right down the road who bred Brahma bulls for sake of rodeo meanness. He was a famous rodeo clown whose job was to tempt the bulls away from the thrown riders in the arena, and was himself gored six times in his career. Ask someone like that the implications of red.

Bulls are colorblind to red, but not other colors. They have green and blue cones, but not red cones. They'll see a red object as yellowish gray.

The Myth Busters tested this on their show in 2007.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Yeah, the "Myth Busters" started their own myth. Try asking a vet or breeder who has to corner one. Tell that to cowboys, or better, tell it to the bull itself. I literally grew up with cowboys and Indians, surrounded by working cattle ranches. It's analogous to the observation that panchromatic film doesn't actually see colors either, but some of them can sure stand out more than others! Want to bet your life on it? That's what some people do for a living, who know the actual case. You don't see them wearing much red !

Anyway, if any of you actually Googled Wilbur, he never was a Hollywood actor, just a rodeo performer. But several Hollywood semi-fictional movies were based on his life, including Bus Stop with Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn was apparently playing his own blonde wife, a glamorous model he actually met in NYC, not at some rural bus stop. She always stayed indoors and almost never went outside, being afraid of the "beahs" (as pronounced in her Brooklyn accent). But they lived way down at the foot of the range, well below black bear zone.

He had all kinds of mutts incredibly trained to do tricks. He also had all kinds of costumes, including a Hollywood quality King Kong suit, where one looked through the chest, with its head clear up to 11 feet of height. The kid across the road from them was himself huge. We whittled some big wooden sandals to make footprint impressions 18 inches long, and went to a remote 4WD camp and left prints behind in the sandbars along the creek. Sure enough, rumors started, and Bigfoot hunters started showing up a couple weeks later. So next we put him in that suit, and he went around terrifying them. It was amazing to see grown men climb trees faster than squirrels. But once one of them came out of his tent with a shotgun, Bigfoot ran off into the woods in those big flopply sandals, and we called it quits.

 

[MattKing]

I suggest that you should get into a ring with a bull and a bunch of different coloured capes, and test what happens when you wave each one in front of the bull.
Please report back from your hospital bed - if you are able!
I've seen two bull fights in my time - one in Mexico, the other in Spain. Never again!

 

[DREW WILEY]

There was an old joke which I won't repeat, but it's about bulls and matadors, ending with ..." Sometimes ze Boool wins!"

 

[SodaAnt]

I've seen two bull fights in my time - one in Mexico, the other in Spain. Never again!

The sport itself is evolving. Rather than kill or injure the bull, some modern forms of bull "fighting" has the matador performing acrobatic maneuvers around the bull, such as doing a backflip over the charging bull. The bull is never touched, unless it's the bull doing the touching, and that's bad news only for the matador.