As a photographer, I am drawn to black-and-white images. When you remove color, a hidden depth of emotion and rawness emerges. It can help turn the ordinary into something magical. As a music photographer, I find that adopting a black-and-white photo profile helps me see the concert for what it is. What do I mean by that?
When you photograph a concert, you are hit with a ton of visual stimuli. Lighting production can be a major distraction for a photographer trying to capture moments. For example, you are in the pit trying to capture photos, and the lighting is all blue or red. No photographer wants that as a photo. During those moments, I see many photographers waiting for the light to change. By shooting in a black-and-white profile photo, I am not distracted or deterred by the lighting because all I see are my highlights, midtones, and shadows. This allows me to focus solely on the composition.
What is a photo profile (picture profile)? In almost every camera system, your camera has creative profiles that let you shoot various “filters” in-camera. When shooting in RAW, your images are not affected by the filter. That way, when you upload your images to whatever editing platform you have, the image will look exactly how the actual scene looked. What makes this trick so useful is that if you can color-correct the image, great, you have a beautifully shot color image, but if not, you still get a stunning black and white image.
Here are some examples of the same unedited images. Showing you these images can help paint a clearer picture as to why I shoot in black and white. During shoots, we as photographers have to juggle so many tasks. For me, someone with ADHD, it can be really hard to stay on task and capture the moments. By removing color, I can focus on documenting the event rather than on how the colors look. Everyone has a different process for shooting and editing. This is only a suggestion to provide some help, as it has helped me.
