The Anachronistic Joy of Black-and-White Photography

To create its black-and-white specialist, Pentax swapped out the sensor in the original K-3 Mark III DSLR with one that’s had the color filter removed. Although it’s not as advanced as the latest mirrorless models, it still has most of the conveniences of a modern camera: autofocus, a comfortable grip, intuitive controls, and an optical viewfinder that lets you look through the lens. Plus, its battery is rated to give you over 200 shots more than our higher-end mirrorless picks’ batteries.

It’s about a quarter of the price of the other black-and-white camera we tried, the Leica M11 Monochrom. And its layout and controls will be more familiar to most photographers than the rangefinder-style Leica’s. Its 25-megapixel images capture plenty of detail, and they can be printed as large as non-professionals would ever want. Plus, it works with all the K-mount lenses Pentax has ever made, going back to the 1970s, and simple adapters will let you mount Pentax screw-mount lenses from as early as the 1950s.

The latest in Leica’s series of black-and-white, rangefinder-style cameras, the M11 Monochrom has a 60-megapixel sensor that’s one of the best full-frame sensors you can get right now. You can attach any M-mount lens that Leica (or any other company) has made, and a simple adapter allows the use of lenses dating back to the 1920s.

But despite the cutting-edge sensor, the rest of the camera is very old-school. You have to focus manually by looking through the camera’s rangefinder or an optional electronic viewfinder (which will cost you a few hundred dollars more). Whether you find this experience charming or frustratingly limiting will depend on how much you enjoy being transported to a time before DSLRs. Any serious photographer who has used a Leica can attest that it is a luxurious experience, but it’s also one that will appeal most to people who already know what they’re doing with a camera.

If you’ve mostly photographed in color, you might think that capturing monochrome images would involve a nearly identical process. People who have shot extensively with black-and-white film or a monochrome-only digital camera know that’s just not true. Using color changes both how you make an image and how that image strikes the viewer.

Here’s an example: William Eggleston’s famous photograph of a blue-green tricycle, framing a similarly colored car in a carport, is an image that works only in color. Sure, the composition of elements within the photo is also important, but the colors tell half of the story of this image.

A good counterpoint is Ansel Adams’s Monolith, The Face of Half Dome (1927), a photo that was captured when black and white was the only widespread option. It creates drama from a motionless subject by emphasizing the mountain’s imposing shape, long striations, and the direction of the light falling on it. The photographer’s use of an intense red filter to darken the sky adds even more depth.

By the time Adams made Moon and Half Dome, in 1960, he had a wide array of color films as an option, but he still chose black and white. This not only connected the new image to his earlier work, but it also highlighted the textures on the rock face and the way that shadows played across the cliff while the moon hovered above.

Color and black-and-white photography are equally capable of producing stunning images, but in the right circumstances, doing away with color can distill a scene into a uniquely powerful vision. It confronts us with the essence of light, helping us to see the objects in our world clearly while also emphasizing the mystery of the shadows that lurk around them.

One of the best things about black-and-white photos is they provide more leeway for editing. You can play with brightness and contrast in more extreme ways, creating intense levels of contrast that would look out of place in a color photo. This freedom of expression allows you to zero in on the image you had in your mind when you clicked the shutter, and it can help the image really shine.

While using these two cameras, I shot all of my images as both raw and JPEG files, and I noticed that both sensors provide a lot of headroom to brighten your image in editing. The Leica’s dual-gain BSI CMOS sensor, in particular, allows for a tremendous amount of image brightening when developing raw files, without the noise you get when shooting high-ISO JPEGs. This means you can use a lower ISO setting and high shutter speeds to intentionally underexpose, and then adjust the exposure after the fact for cleaner shots.

That said, the noise that comes with high-ISO settings on these cameras is not as distracting as it would be in color images. I shot a lot at night in New York City, on overcast days, and left the ISO set to auto most of the time. This was joyously liberating. I was able to pay attention to what was in my frame and how the light hit it, rather than constantly fiddling with the settings on my camera.

There’s one notable downside to shooting black and white on a natively monochrome sensor: You can’t apply digital filters after the fact, as you would when converting color images to black and white or using something like Fujifilm’s Acros film simulation. You’ll have to use a physical yellow, orange, or red filter to darken the sky if you want that effect, as I did with an orange filter for the image at the top of this post.

Some folks just leave a yellow filter on their lens whenever they shoot black and white, in order to keep the sky from being too harsh. Others selectively use color filters based on their subject matter. A green filter will make green leaves look bright. A red filter will do the same for red berries.

Using the Pentax was an unusually fun experience because it offers all of the automatic features you’re used to from modern digital cameras, but you end up with monochrome images with lots of contrast by default. Plus, you can use the custom adjustments to picture style to make your own collection of different looks. It’s also the only option for a camera that shoots native black-and-white images and also has autofocus, which changes how you do street photography and makes it much easier to create photos quickly—especially when compared with the relatively old-school Leica.

The main difference between shooting black-and-white film and a monochrome digital sensor is that you can brighten your shadows a lot with digital images, while you can’t really recover detail in the murky areas of a film image. At the same time, you have a lot of leeway to overexpose with film, while digital images will permanently lose detail in highlights if you overexpose too much.

I set both of these cameras to underexpose a little, to preserve highlights, and then I boosted shadows in Lightroom to make the images look more like what I saw in the moment. Leica’s metering typically chose exposures that were a little brighter than what the Pentax decided on, even when I used the mode meant to preserve highlights. If you’re looking for a more automatic shooting experience, the Pentax is probably more your speed.

The other big difference is that the noise and grain that’s prominent (and sometimes desirable) in film is not as prevalent in monochrome digital images. I made photos with these cameras at over ISO 100,000 that showed significantly less noise than you’d see in an image shot at ISO 3,200 on film. People often pontificate on the virtues of film grain, and traditionalists might heap disdain on the look of digital black-and-white images. But I think both are useful aesthetic options—there’s no need to glorify one over the other.

Probably not.

I’m glad to have had the opportunity to shoot with both of these cameras. But as a collector of vintage lenses and a photographer with decades of experience and a love of film, I am very much the target market. They’re clearly not something the average person would use as an everyday camera, and they don’t make sense for most people.

However, if you’re the type of person who obsessively reads photography forums and dreams about using glass made before you (and possibly your parents) were born, then you should consider leaving the world of color behind and basking in the smooth gray tones of a dedicated black-and-white digital camera.

This article was edited by Ben Keough and Erica Ogg.