A course on black and white iPhone photography

Welcome back to iDonwloadBlog’s lessons in iPhoneography. You can can catch up on previous lessons here. If you need a quick start, feel free to check out my free iPhone Photography tutorial.

Today I want to talk about Black & White Photography. I’m not talking about taking photos and performing black and white conversions. Nope, I’m talking about 100% pure uncut black & white iPhone Photography. The app we are going to be using is a totally cool app called Hueless. Why is it so cool, you ask? Well, because it was the first true black & white camera app for the iPhone. It’s a true camera application. There’s no editing images from your camera roll. When you fire up Hueless, you have to set your exposure, contrast, focus, and filtering at the time you take the photo. Today we will only be looking at exposure, contrast, and filters…

If you have Hueless, make sure you upgrade to 1.6. They released it this week! The update includes the ability to save presets which is the cat’s meow.

Before we get into some of the details, I suggest you take a quick look at the app’s help menu to learn how to navigate your way around.

Exposure

The exposure control is pretty straight forward. It allows you to either increase or decrease the overall brightness of your image.

Contrast

The contrast slider, as you would expect, controls the overall contrast of your image. Contrast, by definition, is the relative difference between dark and light areas of your photo. A lower contrast will produce a flat looking photograph. Where a higher contrast will produce a bold image rich with dark shadows and bright highlights.

Filters

The use of filters is where us photographers really get to flex our creative muscles. There are 5 traditional colors of filters used in black and white photography: red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. Simply put, each filter will brighten its respective color in the image and darken its opposing color. For example, the use of a red filter will brighten warmer colors and darken cooler colors. Say you want to make the blue sky black, slap a red filter on that bad boy! The reverse is true of cooler colors.

Adventures in the Nevada Desert

I was recently working on a non-iPhone project in the Nevada Desert. I was actually shooting a lot of DSLR (big cameras) out there, but I decided to exclusively use Hueless so that I could bring you today’s post. Here are a few of the images I made in the desert using this great little app.

Assignment

Now that we all know a little bit more about black & white photography and how to use Hueless, let’s get out there and make some magic! Tag your Instagram photos with #iDBBandW so we can all follow along. For the next week I will be using Hueless exclusively, so feel free to follow along on IG @Justinbalog or Facebook.

Justin Balog is an award winning photographer and filmmaker. You can follow is daily creative adventures at HOSSedia.com or learn more about iPhone Photography in his iBook ‘Big World Little Lens‘. Click Here for the iPad Version.